Git Command Reference

This Git documentation is based on Git 2.50.1. The up to date Git reference can be found on https://git-scm.com/docs/

git(1)

NAME

git - the stupid content tracker

SYNOPSIS

git [-v | --version] [-h | --help] [-C <path>] [-c <name>=<value>]
    [--exec-path[=<path>]] [--html-path] [--man-path] [--info-path]
    [-p | --paginate | -P | --no-pager] [--no-replace-objects] [--no-lazy-fetch]
    [--no-optional-locks] [--no-advice] [--bare] [--git-dir=<path>]
    [--work-tree=<path>] [--namespace=<name>] [--config-env=<name>=<envvar>]
    <command> [<args>]

DESCRIPTION

Git is a fast, scalable, distributed revision control system with an unusually rich command set that provides both high-level operations and full access to internals.

See the section called “gittutorial(7)” to get started, then see the section called “giteveryday(7)” for a useful minimum set of commands. The Git User's Manual has a more in-depth introduction.

After you mastered the basic concepts, you can come back to this page to learn what commands Git offers. You can learn more about individual Git commands with "git help command". the section called “gitcli(7)” manual page gives you an overview of the command-line command syntax.

A formatted and hyperlinked copy of the latest Git documentation can be viewed at https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html or https://git-scm.com/docs.

OPTIONS

-v , --version

Prints the Git suite version that the git program came from.

This option is internally converted to git version ... and accepts the same options as the the section called “git-version(1)” command. If --help is also given, it takes precedence over --version.

-h , --help

Prints the synopsis and a list of the most commonly used commands. If the option --all or -a is given then all available commands are printed. If a Git command is named this option will bring up the manual page for that command.

Other options are available to control how the manual page is displayed. See the section called “git-help(1)” for more information, because git --help ... is converted internally into git help ....

-C <path>

Run as if git was started in <path> instead of the current working directory. When multiple -C options are given, each subsequent non-absolute -C <path> is interpreted relative to the preceding -C <path>. If <path> is present but empty, e.g. -C "", then the current working directory is left unchanged.

This option affects options that expect path name like --git-dir and --work-tree in that their interpretations of the path names would be made relative to the working directory caused by the -C option. For example the following invocations are equivalent:

git --git-dir=a.git --work-tree=b -C c status
git --git-dir=c/a.git --work-tree=c/b status
-c <name>=<value>

Pass a configuration parameter to the command. The value given will override values from configuration files. The <name> is expected in the same format as listed by git config (subkeys separated by dots).

Note that omitting the = in git -c foo.bar ... is allowed and sets foo.bar to the boolean true value (just like [foo]bar would in a config file). Including the equals but with an empty value (like git -c foo.bar= ...) sets foo.bar to the empty string which git config --type=bool will convert to false.

--config-env=<name>=<envvar>

Like -c <name>=<value>, give configuration variable <name> a value, where <envvar> is the name of an environment variable from which to retrieve the value. Unlike -c there is no shortcut for directly setting the value to an empty string, instead the environment variable itself must be set to the empty string. It is an error if the <envvar> does not exist in the environment. <envvar> may not contain an equals sign to avoid ambiguity with <name> containing one.

This is useful for cases where you want to pass transitory configuration options to git, but are doing so on operating systems where other processes might be able to read your command line (e.g. /proc/self/cmdline), but not your environment (e.g. /proc/self/environ). That behavior is the default on Linux, but may not be on your system.

Note that this might add security for variables such as http.extraHeader where the sensitive information is part of the value, but not e.g. url.<base>.insteadOf where the sensitive information can be part of the key.

--exec-path[=<path>]
Path to wherever your core Git programs are installed. This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_EXEC_PATH environment variable. If no path is given, git will print the current setting and then exit.
--html-path
Print the path, without trailing slash, where Git's HTML documentation is installed and exit.
--man-path
Print the manpath (see man(1)) for the man pages for this version of Git and exit.
--info-path
Print the path where the Info files documenting this version of Git are installed and exit.
-p , --paginate
Pipe all output into less (or if set, $PAGER) if standard output is a terminal. This overrides the pager.<cmd> configuration options (see the "Configuration Mechanism" section below).
-P , --no-pager
Do not pipe Git output into a pager.
--git-dir=<path>

Set the path to the repository (".git" directory). This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_DIR environment variable. It can be an absolute path or relative path to current working directory.

Specifying the location of the ".git" directory using this option (or GIT_DIR environment variable) turns off the repository discovery that tries to find a directory with ".git" subdirectory (which is how the repository and the top-level of the working tree are discovered), and tells Git that you are at the top level of the working tree. If you are not at the top-level directory of the working tree, you should tell Git where the top-level of the working tree is, with the --work-tree=<path> option (or GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable)

If you just want to run git as if it was started in <path> then use git -C <path>.

--work-tree=<path>
Set the path to the working tree. It can be an absolute path or a path relative to the current working directory. This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the core.worktree configuration variable (see core.worktree in the section called “git-config(1)” for a more detailed discussion).
--namespace=<path>
Set the Git namespace. See the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” for more details. Equivalent to setting the GIT_NAMESPACE environment variable.
--bare
Treat the repository as a bare repository. If GIT_DIR environment is not set, it is set to the current working directory.
--no-replace-objects
Do not use replacement refs to replace Git objects. This is equivalent to exporting the GIT_NO_REPLACE_OBJECTS environment variable with any value. See the section called “git-replace(1)” for more information.
--no-lazy-fetch
Do not fetch missing objects from the promisor remote on demand. Useful together with git cat-file -e <object> to see if the object is locally available. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH environment variable to 1.
--no-optional-locks
Do not perform optional operations that require locks. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS to 0.
--no-advice
Disable all advice hints from being printed.
--literal-pathspecs
Treat pathspecs literally (i.e. no globbing, no pathspec magic). This is equivalent to setting the GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS environment variable to 1.
--glob-pathspecs
Add "glob" magic to all pathspec. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_GLOB_PATHSPECS environment variable to 1. Disabling globbing on individual pathspecs can be done using pathspec magic ":(literal)"
--noglob-pathspecs
Add "literal" magic to all pathspec. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_NOGLOB_PATHSPECS environment variable to 1. Enabling globbing on individual pathspecs can be done using pathspec magic ":(glob)"
--icase-pathspecs
Add "icase" magic to all pathspec. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_ICASE_PATHSPECS environment variable to 1.
--list-cmds=<group>[,<group>…]
List commands by group. This is an internal/experimental option and may change or be removed in the future. Supported groups are: builtins, parseopt (builtin commands that use parse-options), main (all commands in libexec directory), others (all other commands in $PATH that have git- prefix), list-<category> (see categories in command-list.txt), nohelpers (exclude helper commands), alias and config (retrieve command list from config variable completion.commands)
--attr-source=<tree-ish>
Read gitattributes from <tree-ish> instead of the worktree. See the section called “gitattributes(5)”. This is equivalent to setting the GIT_ATTR_SOURCE environment variable.

GIT COMMANDS

We divide Git into high level ("porcelain") commands and low level ("plumbing") commands.

High-level commands (porcelain)

We separate the porcelain commands into the main commands and some ancillary user utilities.

Main porcelain commands

the section called “git-add(1)”
Add file contents to the index.
the section called “git-am(1)”
Apply a series of patches from a mailbox.
the section called “git-archive(1)”
Create an archive of files from a named tree.
the section called “git-backfill(1)”
Download missing objects in a partial clone.
the section called “git-bisect(1)”
Use binary search to find the commit that introduced a bug.
the section called “git-branch(1)”
List, create, or delete branches.
the section called “git-bundle(1)”
Move objects and refs by archive.
the section called “git-checkout(1)”
Switch branches or restore working tree files.
the section called “git-cherry-pick(1)”
Apply the changes introduced by some existing commits.
the section called “git-citool(1)”
Graphical alternative to git-commit.
the section called “git-clean(1)”
Remove untracked files from the working tree.
the section called “git-clone(1)”
Clone a repository into a new directory.
the section called “git-commit(1)”
Record changes to the repository.
the section called “git-describe(1)”
Give an object a human readable name based on an available ref.
the section called “git-diff(1)”
Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc.
the section called “git-fetch(1)”
Download objects and refs from another repository.
the section called “git-format-patch(1)”
Prepare patches for e-mail submission.
the section called “git-gc(1)”
Cleanup unnecessary files and optimize the local repository.
the section called “git-grep(1)”
Print lines matching a pattern.
the section called “git-gui(1)”
A portable graphical interface to Git.
the section called “git-init(1)”
Create an empty Git repository or reinitialize an existing one.
the section called “git-log(1)”
Show commit logs.
the section called “git-maintenance(1)”
Run tasks to optimize Git repository data.
the section called “git-merge(1)”
Join two or more development histories together.
the section called “git-mv(1)”
Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink.
the section called “git-notes(1)”
Add or inspect object notes.
the section called “git-pull(1)”
Fetch from and integrate with another repository or a local branch.
the section called “git-push(1)”
Update remote refs along with associated objects.
the section called “git-range-diff(1)”
Compare two commit ranges (e.g. two versions of a branch).
the section called “git-rebase(1)”
Reapply commits on top of another base tip.
the section called “git-reset(1)”
Reset current HEAD to the specified state.
the section called “git-restore(1)”
Restore working tree files.
the section called “git-revert(1)”
Revert some existing commits.
the section called “git-rm(1)”
Remove files from the working tree and from the index.
the section called “git-shortlog(1)”
Summarize git log output.
the section called “git-show(1)”
Show various types of objects.
the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)”
Reduce your working tree to a subset of tracked files.
the section called “git-stash(1)”
Stash the changes in a dirty working directory away.
the section called “git-status(1)”
Show the working tree status.
the section called “git-submodule(1)”
Initialize, update or inspect submodules.
the section called “git-switch(1)”
Switch branches.
the section called “git-tag(1)”
Create, list, delete or verify a tag object signed with GPG.
the section called “git-worktree(1)”
Manage multiple working trees.
the section called “gitk(1)”
The Git repository browser.
the section called “scalar(1)”
A tool for managing large Git repositories.

Ancillary Commands

Manipulators:

the section called “git-config(1)”
Get and set repository or global options.
the section called “git-fast-export(1)”
Git data exporter.
the section called “git-fast-import(1)”
Backend for fast Git data importers.
the section called “git-filter-branch(1)”
Rewrite branches.
the section called “git-mergetool(1)”
Run merge conflict resolution tools to resolve merge conflicts.
the section called “git-pack-refs(1)”
Pack heads and tags for efficient repository access.
the section called “git-prune(1)”
Prune all unreachable objects from the object database.
the section called “git-reflog(1)”
Manage reflog information.
the section called “git-refs(1)”
Low-level access to refs.
the section called “git-remote(1)”
Manage set of tracked repositories.
the section called “git-repack(1)”
Pack unpacked objects in a repository.
the section called “git-replace(1)”
Create, list, delete refs to replace objects.

Interrogators:

the section called “git-annotate(1)”
Annotate file lines with commit information.
the section called “git-blame(1)”
Show what revision and author last modified each line of a file.
the section called “git-bugreport(1)”
Collect information for user to file a bug report.
the section called “git-count-objects(1)”
Count unpacked number of objects and their disk consumption.
the section called “git-diagnose(1)”
Generate a zip archive of diagnostic information.
the section called “git-difftool(1)”
Show changes using common diff tools.
the section called “git-fsck(1)”
Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database.
the section called “git-help(1)”
Display help information about Git.
the section called “git-instaweb(1)”
Instantly browse your working repository in gitweb.
the section called “git-merge-tree(1)”
Perform merge without touching index or working tree.
the section called “git-rerere(1)”
Reuse recorded resolution of conflicted merges.
the section called “git-show-branch(1)”
Show branches and their commits.
the section called “git-verify-commit(1)”
Check the GPG signature of commits.
the section called “git-verify-tag(1)”
Check the GPG signature of tags.
the section called “git-version(1)”
Display version information about Git.
the section called “git-whatchanged(1)”
Show logs with differences each commit introduces.
the section called “gitweb(1)”
Git web interface (web frontend to Git repositories).

Interacting with Others

These commands are to interact with foreign SCM and with other people via patch over e-mail.

the section called “git-archimport(1)”
Import a GNU Arch repository into Git.
the section called “git-cvsexportcommit(1)”
Export a single commit to a CVS checkout.
the section called “git-cvsimport(1)”
Salvage your data out of another SCM people love to hate.
the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”
A CVS server emulator for Git.
the section called “git-imap-send(1)”
Send a collection of patches from stdin to an IMAP folder.
the section called “git-p4(1)”
Import from and submit to Perforce repositories.
the section called “git-quiltimport(1)”
Applies a quilt patchset onto the current branch.
the section called “git-request-pull(1)”
Generates a summary of pending changes.
the section called “git-send-email(1)”
Send a collection of patches as emails.
the section called “git-svn(1)”
Bidirectional operation between a Subversion repository and Git.

Reset, restore and revert

There are three commands with similar names: git reset, git restore and git revert.

  • the section called “git-revert(1)” is about making a new commit that reverts the changes made by other commits.
  • the section called “git-restore(1)” is about restoring files in the working tree from either the index or another commit. This command does not update your branch. The command can also be used to restore files in the index from another commit.
  • the section called “git-reset(1)” is about updating your branch, moving the tip in order to add or remove commits from the branch. This operation changes the commit history.

    git reset can also be used to restore the index, overlapping with git restore.

Low-level commands (plumbing)

Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level commands are sufficient to support development of alternative porcelains. Developers of such porcelains might start by reading about the section called “git-update-index(1)” and the section called “git-read-tree(1)”.

The interface (input, output, set of options and the semantics) to these low-level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain level commands, because these commands are primarily for scripted use. The interface to Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change in order to improve the end user experience.

The following description divides the low-level commands into commands that manipulate objects (in the repository, index, and working tree), commands that interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects and references between repositories.

Manipulation commands

the section called “git-apply(1)”
Apply a patch to files and/or to the index.
the section called “git-checkout-index(1)”
Copy files from the index to the working tree.
the section called “git-commit-graph(1)”
Write and verify Git commit-graph files.
the section called “git-commit-tree(1)”
Create a new commit object.
the section called “git-hash-object(1)”
Compute object ID and optionally create an object from a file.
the section called “git-index-pack(1)”
Build pack index file for an existing packed archive.
the section called “git-merge-file(1)”
Run a three-way file merge.
the section called “git-merge-index(1)”
Run a merge for files needing merging.
the section called “git-mktag(1)”
Creates a tag object with extra validation.
the section called “git-mktree(1)”
Build a tree-object from ls-tree formatted text.
the section called “git-multi-pack-index(1)”
Write and verify multi-pack-indexes.
the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”
Create a packed archive of objects.
the section called “git-prune-packed(1)”
Remove extra objects that are already in pack files.
the section called “git-read-tree(1)”
Reads tree information into the index.
the section called “git-replay(1)”
EXPERIMENTAL: Replay commits on a new base, works with bare repos too.
the section called “git-symbolic-ref(1)”
Read, modify and delete symbolic refs.
the section called “git-unpack-objects(1)”
Unpack objects from a packed archive.
the section called “git-update-index(1)”
Register file contents in the working tree to the index.
the section called “git-update-ref(1)”
Update the object name stored in a ref safely.
the section called “git-write-tree(1)”
Create a tree object from the current index.

Interrogation commands

the section called “git-cat-file(1)”
Provide contents or details of repository objects.
the section called “git-cherry(1)”
Find commits yet to be applied to upstream.
the section called “git-diff-files(1)”
Compares files in the working tree and the index.
the section called “git-diff-index(1)”
Compare a tree to the working tree or index.
the section called “git-diff-pairs(1)”
Compare the content and mode of provided blob pairs.
the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”
Compares the content and mode of blobs found via two tree objects.
the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”
Output information on each ref.
the section called “git-for-each-repo(1)”
Run a Git command on a list of repositories.
the section called “git-get-tar-commit-id(1)”
Extract commit ID from an archive created using git-archive.
the section called “git-ls-files(1)”
Show information about files in the index and the working tree.
the section called “git-ls-remote(1)”
List references in a remote repository.
the section called “git-ls-tree(1)”
List the contents of a tree object.
the section called “git-merge-base(1)”
Find as good common ancestors as possible for a merge.
the section called “git-name-rev(1)”
Find symbolic names for given revs.
the section called “git-pack-redundant(1)”
Find redundant pack files.
the section called “git-rev-list(1)”
Lists commit objects in reverse chronological order.
the section called “git-rev-parse(1)”
Pick out and massage parameters.
the section called “git-show-index(1)”
Show packed archive index.
the section called “git-show-ref(1)”
List references in a local repository.
the section called “git-unpack-file(1)”
Creates a temporary file with a blob's contents.
the section called “git-var(1)”
Show a Git logical variable.
the section called “git-verify-pack(1)”
Validate packed Git archive files.

In general, the interrogate commands do not touch the files in the working tree.

Syncing repositories

the section called “git-daemon(1)”
A really simple server for Git repositories.
the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)”
Receive missing objects from another repository.
the section called “git-http-backend(1)”
Server side implementation of Git over HTTP.
the section called “git-send-pack(1)”
Push objects over Git protocol to another repository.
the section called “git-update-server-info(1)”
Update auxiliary info file to help dumb servers.

The following are helper commands used by the above; end users typically do not use them directly.

the section called “git-http-fetch(1)”
Download from a remote Git repository via HTTP.
the section called “git-http-push(1)”
Push objects over HTTP/DAV to another repository.
the section called “git-receive-pack(1)”
Receive what is pushed into the repository.
the section called “git-shell(1)”
Restricted login shell for Git-only SSH access.
the section called “git-upload-archive(1)”
Send archive back to git-archive.
the section called “git-upload-pack(1)”
Send objects packed back to git-fetch-pack.

Internal helper commands

These are internal helper commands used by other commands; end users typically do not use them directly.

the section called “git-check-attr(1)”
Display gitattributes information.
the section called “git-check-ignore(1)”
Debug gitignore / exclude files.
the section called “git-check-mailmap(1)”
Show canonical names and email addresses of contacts.
the section called “git-check-ref-format(1)”
Ensures that a reference name is well formed.
the section called “git-column(1)”
Display data in columns.
the section called “git-credential(1)”
Retrieve and store user credentials.
the section called “git-credential-cache(1)”
Helper to temporarily store passwords in memory.
the section called “git-credential-store(1)”
Helper to store credentials on disk.
the section called “git-fmt-merge-msg(1)”
Produce a merge commit message.
the section called “git-hook(1)”
Run git hooks.
the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”
Add or parse structured information in commit messages.
the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”
Extracts patch and authorship from a single e-mail message.
the section called “git-mailsplit(1)”
Simple UNIX mbox splitter program.
the section called “git-merge-one-file(1)”
The standard helper program to use with git-merge-index.
the section called “git-patch-id(1)”
Compute unique ID for a patch.
the section called “git-sh-i18n(1)”
Git's i18n setup code for shell scripts.
the section called “git-sh-setup(1)”
Common Git shell script setup code.
the section called “git-stripspace(1)”
Remove unnecessary whitespace.

Guides

The following documentation pages are guides about Git concepts.

the section called “gitcore-tutorial(7)”
A Git core tutorial for developers.
the section called “gitcredentials(7)”
Providing usernames and passwords to Git.
the section called “gitcvs-migration(7)”
Git for CVS users.
the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”
Tweaking diff output.
the section called “giteveryday(7)”
A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git.
the section called “gitfaq(7)”
Frequently asked questions about using Git.
the section called “gitglossary(7)”
A Git Glossary.
the section called “gitnamespaces(7)”
Git namespaces.
the section called “gitremote-helpers(7)”
Helper programs to interact with remote repositories.
the section called “gitsubmodules(7)”
Mounting one repository inside another.
the section called “gittutorial(7)”
A tutorial introduction to Git.
the section called “gittutorial-2(7)”
A tutorial introduction to Git: part two.
the section called “gitworkflows(7)”
An overview of recommended workflows with Git.

Repository, command and file interfaces

This documentation discusses repository and command interfaces which users are expected to interact with directly. See --user-formats in the section called “git-help(1)” for more details on the criteria.

the section called “gitattributes(5)”
Defining attributes per path.
the section called “gitcli(7)”
Git command-line interface and conventions.
the section called “githooks(5)”
Hooks used by Git.
the section called “gitignore(5)”
Specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore.
the section called “gitmailmap(5)”
Map author/committer names and/or E-Mail addresses.
the section called “gitmodules(5)”
Defining submodule properties.
the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”
Git Repository Layout.
the section called “gitrevisions(7)”
Specifying revisions and ranges for Git.

File formats, protocols and other developer interfaces

This documentation discusses file formats, over-the-wire protocols and other git developer interfaces. See --developer-interfaces in the section called “git-help(1)”.

Configuration Mechanism

Git uses a simple text format to store customizations that are per repository and are per user. Such a configuration file may look like this:

#
# A '#' or ';' character indicates a comment.
#

; core variables
[core]
        ; Don't trust file modes
        filemode = false

; user identity
[user]
        name = "Junio C Hamano"
        email = "gitster@pobox.com"

Various commands read from the configuration file and adjust their operation accordingly. See the section called “git-config(1)” for a list and more details about the configuration mechanism.

Identifier Terminology

<object>
Indicates the object name for any type of object.
<blob>
Indicates a blob object name.
<tree>
Indicates a tree object name.
<commit>
Indicates a commit object name.
<tree-ish>
Indicates a tree, commit or tag object name. A command that takes a <tree-ish> argument ultimately wants to operate on a <tree> object but automatically dereferences <commit> and <tag> objects that point at a <tree>.
<commit-ish>
Indicates a commit or tag object name. A command that takes a <commit-ish> argument ultimately wants to operate on a <commit> object but automatically dereferences <tag> objects that point at a <commit>.
<type>
Indicates that an object type is required. Currently one of: blob, tree, commit, or tag.
<file>
Indicates a filename - almost always relative to the root of the tree structure GIT_INDEX_FILE describes.

Symbolic Identifiers

Any Git command accepting any <object> can also use the following symbolic notation:

HEAD
indicates the head of the current branch.
<tag>
a valid tag name (i.e. a refs/tags/<tag> reference).
<head>
a valid head name (i.e. a refs/heads/<head> reference).

For a more complete list of ways to spell object names, see "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.

File/Directory Structure

Please see the the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)” document.

Read the section called “githooks(5)” for more details about each hook.

Higher level SCMs may provide and manage additional information in the $GIT_DIR.

Environment Variables

Various Git commands pay attention to environment variables and change their behavior. The environment variables marked as "Boolean" take their values the same way as Boolean valued configuration variables, i.e., "true", "yes", "on" and positive numbers are taken as "yes", while "false", "no", "off", and "0" are taken as "no".

Here are the variables:

System

HOME
Specifies the path to the user's home directory. On Windows, if unset, Git will set a process environment variable equal to: $HOMEDRIVE$HOMEPATH if both $HOMEDRIVE and $HOMEPATH exist; otherwise $USERPROFILE if $USERPROFILE exists.

The Git Repository

These environment variables apply to all core Git commands. Nb: it is worth noting that they may be used/overridden by SCMS sitting above Git so take care if using a foreign front-end.

GIT_INDEX_FILE
This environment variable specifies an alternate index file. If not specified, the default of $GIT_DIR/index is used.
GIT_INDEX_VERSION
This environment variable specifies what index version is used when writing the index file out. It won't affect existing index files. By default index file version 2 or 3 is used. See the section called “git-update-index(1)” for more information.
GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
If the object storage directory is specified via this environment variable then the sha1 directories are created underneath - otherwise the default $GIT_DIR/objects directory is used.
GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES

Due to the immutable nature of Git objects, old objects can be archived into shared, read-only directories. This variable specifies a ":" separated (on Windows ";" separated) list of Git object directories which can be used to search for Git objects. New objects will not be written to these directories.

Entries that begin with " (double-quote) will be interpreted as C-style quoted paths, removing leading and trailing double-quotes and respecting backslash escapes. E.g., the value "path-with-\"-and-:-in-it":vanilla-path has two paths: path-with-"-and-:-in-it and vanilla-path.

GIT_DIR
If the GIT_DIR environment variable is set then it specifies a path to use instead of the default .git for the base of the repository. The --git-dir command-line option also sets this value.
GIT_WORK_TREE
Set the path to the root of the working tree. This can also be controlled by the --work-tree command-line option and the core.worktree configuration variable.
GIT_NAMESPACE
Set the Git namespace; see the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” for details. The --namespace command-line option also sets this value.
GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES
This should be a colon-separated list of absolute paths. If set, it is a list of directories that Git should not chdir up into while looking for a repository directory (useful for excluding slow-loading network directories). It will not exclude the current working directory or a GIT_DIR set on the command line or in the environment. Normally, Git has to read the entries in this list and resolve any symlink that might be present in order to compare them with the current directory. However, if even this access is slow, you can add an empty entry to the list to tell Git that the subsequent entries are not symlinks and needn't be resolved; e.g., GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES=/maybe/symlink::/very/slow/non/symlink.
GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM
When run in a directory that does not have ".git" repository directory, Git tries to find such a directory in the parent directories to find the top of the working tree, but by default it does not cross filesystem boundaries. This Boolean environment variable can be set to true to tell Git not to stop at filesystem boundaries. Like GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES, this will not affect an explicit repository directory set via GIT_DIR or on the command line.
GIT_COMMON_DIR
If this variable is set to a path, non-worktree files that are normally in $GIT_DIR will be taken from this path instead. Worktree-specific files such as HEAD or index are taken from $GIT_DIR. See the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)” and the section called “git-worktree(1)” for details. This variable has lower precedence than other path variables such as GIT_INDEX_FILE, GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY…
GIT_DEFAULT_HASH
If this variable is set, the default hash algorithm for new repositories will be set to this value. This value is ignored when cloning and the setting of the remote repository is always used. The default is "sha1". See --object-format in the section called “git-init(1)”.
GIT_DEFAULT_REF_FORMAT
If this variable is set, the default reference backend format for new repositories will be set to this value. The default is "files". See --ref-format in the section called “git-init(1)”.

Git Commits

GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
The human-readable name used in the author identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. Overrides the user.name and author.name configuration settings.
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
The email address used in the author identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. Overrides the user.email and author.email configuration settings.
GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
The date used for the author identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for valid formats.
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
The human-readable name used in the committer identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. Overrides the user.name and committer.name configuration settings.
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
The email address used in the author identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. Overrides the user.email and committer.email configuration settings.
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE
The date used for the committer identity when creating commit or tag objects, or when writing reflogs. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for valid formats.
EMAIL
The email address used in the author and committer identities if no other relevant environment variable or configuration setting has been set.

Git Diffs

GIT_DIFF_OPTS
Only valid setting is "--unified=??" or "-u??" to set the number of context lines shown when a unified diff is created. This takes precedence over any "-U" or "--unified" option value passed on the Git diff command line.
GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF

When the environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is set, the program named by it is called to generate diffs, and Git does not use its builtin diff machinery. For a path that is added, removed, or modified, GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is called with 7 parameters:

path old-file old-hex old-mode new-file new-hex new-mode

where:

<old|new>-file
are files GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF can use to read the contents of <old|new>,
<old|new>-hex
are the 40-hexdigit SHA-1 hashes,
<old|new>-mode

are the octal representation of the file modes.

The file parameters can point at the user's working file (e.g. new-file in "git-diff-files"), /dev/null (e.g. old-file when a new file is added), or a temporary file (e.g. old-file in the index). GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF should not worry about unlinking the temporary file -- it is removed when GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF exits.

For a path that is unmerged, GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is called with 1 parameter, <path>.

For each path GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is called, two environment variables, GIT_DIFF_PATH_COUNTER and GIT_DIFF_PATH_TOTAL are set.

GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE
If this Boolean environment variable is set to true then the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.
GIT_DIFF_PATH_COUNTER
A 1-based counter incremented by one for every path.
GIT_DIFF_PATH_TOTAL
The total number of paths.

other

GIT_MERGE_VERBOSITY
A number controlling the amount of output shown by the recursive merge strategy. Overrides merge.verbosity. See the section called “git-merge(1)”
GIT_PAGER
This environment variable overrides $PAGER. If it is set to an empty string or to the value "cat", Git will not launch a pager. See also the core.pager option in the section called “git-config(1)”.
GIT_PROGRESS_DELAY
A number controlling how many seconds to delay before showing optional progress indicators. Defaults to 2.
GIT_EDITOR
This environment variable overrides $EDITOR and $VISUAL. It is used by several Git commands when, on interactive mode, an editor is to be launched. See also the section called “git-var(1)” and the core.editor option in the section called “git-config(1)”.
GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR
This environment variable overrides the configured Git editor when editing the todo list of an interactive rebase. See also the section called “git-rebase(1)” and the sequence.editor option in the section called “git-config(1)”.
GIT_SSH , GIT_SSH_COMMAND

If either of these environment variables is set then git fetch and git push will use the specified command instead of ssh when they need to connect to a remote system. The command-line parameters passed to the configured command are determined by the ssh variant. See ssh.variant option in the section called “git-config(1)” for details.

$GIT_SSH_COMMAND takes precedence over $GIT_SSH, and is interpreted by the shell, which allows additional arguments to be included. $GIT_SSH on the other hand must be just the path to a program (which can be a wrapper shell script, if additional arguments are needed).

Usually it is easier to configure any desired options through your personal .ssh/config file. Please consult your ssh documentation for further details.

GIT_SSH_VARIANT
If this environment variable is set, it overrides Git's autodetection whether GIT_SSH/GIT_SSH_COMMAND/core.sshCommand refer to OpenSSH, plink or tortoiseplink. This variable overrides the config setting ssh.variant that serves the same purpose.
GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY
Setting and exporting this environment variable to any value tells Git not to verify the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS.
GIT_ATTR_SOURCE
Sets the treeish that gitattributes will be read from.
GIT_ASKPASS
If this environment variable is set, then Git commands which need to acquire passwords or passphrases (e.g. for HTTP or IMAP authentication) will call this program with a suitable prompt as command-line argument and read the password from its STDOUT. See also the core.askPass option in the section called “git-config(1)”.
GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT
If this Boolean environment variable is set to false, git will not prompt on the terminal (e.g., when asking for HTTP authentication).
GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL , GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM
Take the configuration from the given files instead from global or system-level configuration files. If GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM is set, the system config file defined at build time (usually /etc/gitconfig) will not be read. Likewise, if GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL is set, neither $HOME/.gitconfig nor $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config will be read. Can be set to /dev/null to skip reading configuration files of the respective level.
GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM
Whether to skip reading settings from the system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig file. This Boolean environment variable can be used along with $HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to create a predictable environment for a picky script, or you can set it to true to temporarily avoid using a buggy /etc/gitconfig file while waiting for someone with sufficient permissions to fix it.
GIT_FLUSH
If this Boolean environment variable is set to true, then commands such as git blame (in incremental mode), git rev-list, git log, git check-attr and git check-ignore will force a flush of the output stream after each record have been flushed. If this variable is set to false, the output of these commands will be done using completely buffered I/O. If this environment variable is not set, Git will choose buffered or record-oriented flushing based on whether stdout appears to be redirected to a file or not.
GIT_TRACE

Enables general trace messages, e.g. alias expansion, built-in command execution and external command execution.

If this variable is set to "1", "2" or "true" (comparison is case insensitive), trace messages will be printed to stderr.

If the variable is set to an integer value greater than 2 and lower than 10 (strictly) then Git will interpret this value as an open file descriptor and will try to write the trace messages into this file descriptor.

Alternatively, if the variable is set to an absolute path (starting with a / character), Git will interpret this as a file path and will try to append the trace messages to it.

Unsetting the variable, or setting it to empty, "0" or "false" (case insensitive) disables trace messages.

GIT_TRACE_FSMONITOR
Enables trace messages for the filesystem monitor extension. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_PACK_ACCESS
Enables trace messages for all accesses to any packs. For each access, the pack file name and an offset in the pack is recorded. This may be helpful for troubleshooting some pack-related performance problems. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_PACKET
Enables trace messages for all packets coming in or out of a given program. This can help with debugging object negotiation or other protocol issues. Tracing is turned off at a packet starting with "PACK" (but see GIT_TRACE_PACKFILE below). See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_PACKFILE

Enables tracing of packfiles sent or received by a given program. Unlike other trace output, this trace is verbatim: no headers, and no quoting of binary data. You almost certainly want to direct into a file (e.g., GIT_TRACE_PACKFILE=/tmp/my.pack) rather than displaying it on the terminal or mixing it with other trace output.

Note that this is currently only implemented for the client side of clones and fetches.

GIT_TRACE_PERFORMANCE
Enables performance related trace messages, e.g. total execution time of each Git command. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_REFS
Enables trace messages for operations on the ref database. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_SETUP
Enables trace messages printing the .git, working tree and current working directory after Git has completed its setup phase. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_SHALLOW
Enables trace messages that can help debugging fetching / cloning of shallow repositories. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_CURL
Enables a curl full trace dump of all incoming and outgoing data, including descriptive information, of the git transport protocol. This is similar to doing curl --trace-ascii on the command line. See GIT_TRACE for available trace output options.
GIT_TRACE_CURL_NO_DATA
When a curl trace is enabled (see GIT_TRACE_CURL above), do not dump data (that is, only dump info lines and headers).
GIT_TRACE2

Enables more detailed trace messages from the "trace2" library. Output from GIT_TRACE2 is a simple text-based format for human readability.

If this variable is set to "1", "2" or "true" (comparison is case insensitive), trace messages will be printed to stderr.

If the variable is set to an integer value greater than 2 and lower than 10 (strictly) then Git will interpret this value as an open file descriptor and will try to write the trace messages into this file descriptor.

Alternatively, if the variable is set to an absolute path (starting with a / character), Git will interpret this as a file path and will try to append the trace messages to it. If the path already exists and is a directory, the trace messages will be written to files (one per process) in that directory, named according to the last component of the SID and an optional counter (to avoid filename collisions).

In addition, if the variable is set to af_unix:[<socket-type>:]<absolute-pathname>, Git will try to open the path as a Unix Domain Socket. The socket type can be either stream or dgram.

Unsetting the variable, or setting it to empty, "0" or "false" (case insensitive) disables trace messages.

See Trace2 documentation for full details.

GIT_TRACE2_EVENT
This setting writes a JSON-based format that is suited for machine interpretation. See GIT_TRACE2 for available trace output options and Trace2 documentation for full details.
GIT_TRACE2_PERF
In addition to the text-based messages available in GIT_TRACE2, this setting writes a column-based format for understanding nesting regions. See GIT_TRACE2 for available trace output options and Trace2 documentation for full details.
GIT_TRACE_REDACT
By default, when tracing is activated, Git redacts the values of cookies, the "Authorization:" header, the "Proxy-Authorization:" header and packfile URIs. Set this Boolean environment variable to false to prevent this redaction.
GIT_NO_REPLACE_OBJECTS
Setting and exporting this environment variable tells Git to ignore replacement refs and do not replace Git objects.
GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS
Setting this Boolean environment variable to true will cause Git to treat all pathspecs literally, rather than as glob patterns. For example, running GIT_LITERAL_PATHSPECS=1 git log -- '*.c' will search for commits that touch the path *.c, not any paths that the glob *.c matches. You might want this if you are feeding literal paths to Git (e.g., paths previously given to you by git ls-tree, --raw diff output, etc).
GIT_GLOB_PATHSPECS
Setting this Boolean environment variable to true will cause Git to treat all pathspecs as glob patterns (aka "glob" magic).
GIT_NOGLOB_PATHSPECS
Setting this Boolean environment variable to true will cause Git to treat all pathspecs as literal (aka "literal" magic).
GIT_ICASE_PATHSPECS
Setting this Boolean environment variable to true will cause Git to treat all pathspecs as case-insensitive.
GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH
Setting this Boolean environment variable to true tells Git not to lazily fetch missing objects from the promisor remote on demand.
GIT_REFLOG_ACTION
When a ref is updated, reflog entries are created to keep track of the reason why the ref was updated (which is typically the name of the high-level command that updated the ref), in addition to the old and new values of the ref. A scripted Porcelain command can use set_reflog_action helper function in git-sh-setup to set its name to this variable when it is invoked as the top level command by the end user, to be recorded in the body of the reflog.
GIT_REF_PARANOIA
If this Boolean environment variable is set to false, ignore broken or badly named refs when iterating over lists of refs. Normally Git will try to include any such refs, which may cause some operations to fail. This is usually preferable, as potentially destructive operations (e.g., the section called “git-prune(1)”) are better off aborting rather than ignoring broken refs (and thus considering the history they point to as not worth saving). The default value is 1 (i.e., be paranoid about detecting and aborting all operations). You should not normally need to set this to 0, but it may be useful when trying to salvage data from a corrupted repository.
GIT_COMMIT_GRAPH_PARANOIA

When loading a commit object from the commit-graph, Git performs an existence check on the object in the object database. This is done to avoid issues with stale commit-graphs that contain references to already-deleted commits, but comes with a performance penalty.

The default is "false", which disables the aforementioned behavior. Setting this to "true" enables the existence check so that stale commits will never be returned from the commit-graph at the cost of performance.

GIT_ALLOW_PROTOCOL
If set to a colon-separated list of protocols, behave as if protocol.allow is set to never, and each of the listed protocols has protocol.<name>.allow set to always (overriding any existing configuration). See the description of protocol.allow in the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.
GIT_PROTOCOL_FROM_USER
Set this Boolean environment variable to false to prevent protocols used by fetch/push/clone which are configured to the user state. This is useful to restrict recursive submodule initialization from an untrusted repository or for programs which feed potentially-untrusted URLS to git commands. See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.
GIT_PROTOCOL

For internal use only. Used in handshaking the wire protocol. Contains a colon : separated list of keys with optional values <key>[=<value>]. Presence of unknown keys and values must be ignored.

Note that servers may need to be configured to allow this variable to pass over some transports. It will be propagated automatically when accessing local repositories (i.e., file:// or a filesystem path), as well as over the git:// protocol. For git-over-http, it should work automatically in most configurations, but see the discussion in the section called “git-http-backend(1)”. For git-over-ssh, the ssh server may need to be configured to allow clients to pass this variable (e.g., by using AcceptEnv GIT_PROTOCOL with OpenSSH).

This configuration is optional. If the variable is not propagated, then clients will fall back to the original "v0" protocol (but may miss out on some performance improvements or features). This variable currently only affects clones and fetches; it is not yet used for pushes (but may be in the future).

GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS
If this Boolean environment variable is set to false, Git will complete any requested operation without performing any optional sub-operations that require taking a lock. For example, this will prevent git status from refreshing the index as a side effect. This is useful for processes running in the background which do not want to cause lock contention with other operations on the repository. Defaults to 1.
GIT_REDIRECT_STDIN , GIT_REDIRECT_STDOUT , GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR

Windows-only: allow redirecting the standard input/output/error handles to paths specified by the environment variables. This is particularly useful in multi-threaded applications where the canonical way to pass standard handles via CreateProcess() is not an option because it would require the handles to be marked inheritable (and consequently every spawned process would inherit them, possibly blocking regular Git operations). The primary intended use case is to use named pipes for communication (e.g. \\.\pipe\my-git-stdin-123).

Two special values are supported: off will simply close the corresponding standard handle, and if GIT_REDIRECT_STDERR is 2>&1, standard error will be redirected to the same handle as standard output.

GIT_PRINT_SHA1_ELLIPSIS (deprecated)
If set to yes, print an ellipsis following an (abbreviated) SHA-1 value. This affects indications of detached HEADs (the section called “git-checkout(1)”) and the raw diff output (the section called “git-diff(1)”). Printing an ellipsis in the cases mentioned is no longer considered adequate and support for it is likely to be removed in the foreseeable future (along with the variable).
GIT_ADVICE
If set to 0, then disable all advice messages. These messages are intended to provide hints to human users that may help them get out of problematic situations or take advantage of new features. Users can disable individual messages using the advice.* config keys. These messages may be disruptive to tools that execute Git processes, so this variable is available to disable the messages. (The --no-advice global option is also available, but old Git versions may fail when this option is not understood. The environment variable will be ignored by Git versions that do not understand it.)

Discussion

More detail on the following is available from the Git concepts chapter of the user-manual and the section called “gitcore-tutorial(7)”.

A Git project normally consists of a working directory with a ".git" subdirectory at the top level. The .git directory contains, among other things, a compressed object database representing the complete history of the project, an "index" file which links that history to the current contents of the working tree, and named pointers into that history such as tags and branch heads.

The object database contains objects of three main types: blobs, which hold file data; trees, which point to blobs and other trees to build up directory hierarchies; and commits, which each reference a single tree and some number of parent commits.

The commit, equivalent to what other systems call a "changeset" or "version", represents a step in the project's history, and each parent represents an immediately preceding step. Commits with more than one parent represent merges of independent lines of development.

All objects are named by the SHA-1 hash of their contents, normally written as a string of 40 hex digits. Such names are globally unique. The entire history leading up to a commit can be vouched for by signing just that commit. A fourth object type, the tag, is provided for this purpose.

When first created, objects are stored in individual files, but for efficiency may later be compressed together into "pack files".

Named pointers called refs mark interesting points in history. A ref may contain the SHA-1 name of an object or the name of another ref (the latter is called a "symbolic ref"). Refs with names beginning refs/head/ contain the SHA-1 name of the most recent commit (or "head") of a branch under development. SHA-1 names of tags of interest are stored under refs/tags/. A symbolic ref named HEAD contains the name of the currently checked-out branch.

The index file is initialized with a list of all paths and, for each path, a blob object and a set of attributes. The blob object represents the contents of the file as of the head of the current branch. The attributes (last modified time, size, etc.) are taken from the corresponding file in the working tree. Subsequent changes to the working tree can be found by comparing these attributes. The index may be updated with new content, and new commits may be created from the content stored in the index.

The index is also capable of storing multiple entries (called "stages") for a given pathname. These stages are used to hold the various unmerged version of a file when a merge is in progress.

SECURITY

Some configuration options and hook files may cause Git to run arbitrary shell commands. Because configuration and hooks are not copied using git clone, it is generally safe to clone remote repositories with untrusted content, inspect them with git log, and so on.

However, it is not safe to run Git commands in a .git directory (or the working tree that surrounds it) when that .git directory itself comes from an untrusted source. The commands in its config and hooks are executed in the usual way.

By default, Git will refuse to run when the repository is owned by someone other than the user running the command. See the entry for safe.directory in the section called “git-config(1)”. While this can help protect you in a multi-user environment, note that you can also acquire untrusted repositories that are owned by you (for example, if you extract a zip file or tarball from an untrusted source). In such cases, you'd need to "sanitize" the untrusted repository first.

If you have an untrusted .git directory, you should first clone it with git clone --no-local to obtain a clean copy. Git does restrict the set of options and hooks that will be run by upload-pack, which handles the server side of a clone or fetch, but beware that the surface area for attack against upload-pack is large, so this does carry some risk. The safest thing is to serve the repository as an unprivileged user (either via the section called “git-daemon(1)”, ssh, or using other tools to change user ids). See the discussion in the SECURITY section of the section called “git-upload-pack(1)”.

FURTHER DOCUMENTATION

See the references in the "description" section to get started using Git. The following is probably more detail than necessary for a first-time user.

The Git concepts chapter of the user-manual and the section called “gitcore-tutorial(7)” both provide introductions to the underlying Git architecture.

See the section called “gitworkflows(7)” for an overview of recommended workflows.

See also the howto documents for some useful examples.

The internals are documented in the Git API documentation.

Users migrating from CVS may also want to read the section called “gitcvs-migration(7)”.

Authors

Git was started by Linus Torvalds, and is currently maintained by Junio C Hamano. Numerous contributions have come from the Git mailing list <git@vger.kernel.org>. https://openhub.net/p/git/contributors/summary gives you a more complete list of contributors.

If you have a clone of git.git itself, the output of the section called “git-shortlog(1)” and the section called “git-blame(1)” can show you the authors for specific parts of the project.

Reporting Bugs

Report bugs to the Git mailing list <git@vger.kernel.org> where the development and maintenance is primarily done. You do not have to be subscribed to the list to send a message there. See the list archive at https://lore.kernel.org/git for previous bug reports and other discussions.

Issues which are security relevant should be disclosed privately to the Git Security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-add(1)

NAME

git-add - Add file contents to the index

SYNOPSIS

git add [--verbose | -v] [--dry-run | -n] [--force | -f] [--interactive | -i] [--patch | -p]
        [--edit | -e] [--[no-]all | -A | --[no-]ignore-removal | [--update | -u]] [--sparse]
        [--intent-to-add | -N] [--refresh] [--ignore-errors] [--ignore-missing] [--renormalize]
        [--chmod=(+|-)x] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
        [--] [<pathspec>]

DESCRIPTION

This command updates the index using the current content found in the working tree, to prepare the content staged for the next commit. It typically adds the current content of existing paths as a whole, but with some options it can also be used to add content with only part of the changes made to the working tree files applied, or remove paths that do not exist in the working tree anymore.

The "index" holds a snapshot of the content of the working tree, and it is this snapshot that is taken as the contents of the next commit. Thus after making any changes to the working tree, and before running the commit command, you must use the add command to add any new or modified files to the index.

This command can be performed multiple times before a commit. It only adds the content of the specified file(s) at the time the add command is run; if you want subsequent changes included in the next commit, then you must run git add again to add the new content to the index.

The git status command can be used to obtain a summary of which files have changes that are staged for the next commit.

The git add command will not add ignored files by default. If any ignored files were explicitly specified on the command line, git add will fail with a list of ignored files. Ignored files reached by directory recursion or filename globbing performed by Git (quote your globs before the shell) will be silently ignored. The git add command can be used to add ignored files with the -f (force) option.

Please see the section called “git-commit(1)” for alternative ways to add content to a commit.

OPTIONS

<pathspec>...

Files to add content from. Fileglobs (e.g. *.c) can be given to add all matching files. Also a leading directory name (e.g. dir to add dir/file1 and dir/file2) can be given to update the index to match the current state of the directory as a whole (e.g. specifying dir will record not just a file dir/file1 modified in the working tree, a file dir/file2 added to the working tree, but also a file dir/file3 removed from the working tree). Note that older versions of Git used to ignore removed files; use --no-all option if you want to add modified or new files but ignore removed ones.

For more details about the <pathspec> syntax, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

-n , --dry-run
Don't actually add the file(s), just show if they exist and/or will be ignored.
-v , --verbose
Be verbose.
-f , --force
Allow adding otherwise ignored files.
--sparse
Allow updating index entries outside of the sparse-checkout cone. Normally, git add refuses to update index entries whose paths do not fit within the sparse-checkout cone, since those files might be removed from the working tree without warning. See the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more details.
-i , --interactive
Add modified contents in the working tree interactively to the index. Optional path arguments may be supplied to limit operation to a subset of the working tree. See Interactive mode for details.
-p , --patch

Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index.

This effectively runs add --interactive, but bypasses the initial command menu and directly jumps to the patch subcommand. See Interactive mode for details.

-e , --edit

Open the diff vs. the index in an editor and let the user edit it. After the editor was closed, adjust the hunk headers and apply the patch to the index.

The intent of this option is to pick and choose lines of the patch to apply, or even to modify the contents of lines to be staged. This can be quicker and more flexible than using the interactive hunk selector. However, it is easy to confuse oneself and create a patch that does not apply to the index. See EDITING PATCHES below.

-u , --update

Update the index just where it already has an entry matching <pathspec>. This removes as well as modifies index entries to match the working tree, but adds no new files.

If no <pathspec> is given when -u option is used, all tracked files in the entire working tree are updated (old versions of Git used to limit the update to the current directory and its subdirectories).

-A , --all , --no-ignore-removal

Update the index not only where the working tree has a file matching <pathspec> but also where the index already has an entry. This adds, modifies, and removes index entries to match the working tree.

If no <pathspec> is given when -A option is used, all files in the entire working tree are updated (old versions of Git used to limit the update to the current directory and its subdirectories).

--no-all , --ignore-removal

Update the index by adding new files that are unknown to the index and files modified in the working tree, but ignore files that have been removed from the working tree. This option is a no-op when no <pathspec> is used.

This option is primarily to help users who are used to older versions of Git, whose git add <pathspec>... was a synonym for git add --no-all <pathspec>..., i.e. ignored removed files.

-N , --intent-to-add
Record only the fact that the path will be added later. An entry for the path is placed in the index with no content. This is useful for, among other things, showing the unstaged content of such files with git diff and committing them with git commit -a.
--refresh
Don't add the file(s), but only refresh their stat() information in the index.
--ignore-errors
If some files could not be added because of errors indexing them, do not abort the operation, but continue adding the others. The command shall still exit with non-zero status. The configuration variable add.ignoreErrors can be set to true to make this the default behaviour.
--ignore-missing
This option can only be used together with --dry-run. By using this option the user can check if any of the given files would be ignored, no matter if they are already present in the work tree or not.
--no-warn-embedded-repo
By default, git add will warn when adding an embedded repository to the index without using git submodule add to create an entry in .gitmodules. This option will suppress the warning (e.g., if you are manually performing operations on submodules).
--renormalize
Apply the "clean" process freshly to all tracked files to forcibly add them again to the index. This is useful after changing core.autocrlf configuration or the text attribute in order to correct files added with wrong CRLF/LF line endings. This option implies -u. Lone CR characters are untouched, thus while a CRLF cleans to LF, a CRCRLF sequence is only partially cleaned to CRLF.
--chmod=(+|-)x
Override the executable bit of the added files. The executable bit is only changed in the index, the files on disk are left unchanged.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).
--
This option can be used to separate command-line options from the list of files, (useful when filenames might be mistaken for command-line options).

EXAMPLES

  • Adds content from all *.txt files under Documentation directory and its subdirectories:

    $ git add Documentation/\*.txt

    Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell in this example; this lets the command include the files from subdirectories of Documentation/ directory.

  • Considers adding content from all git-*.sh scripts:

    $ git add git-*.sh

    Because this example lets the shell expand the asterisk (i.e. you are listing the files explicitly), it does not consider subdir/git-foo.sh.

INTERACTIVE MODE

When the command enters the interactive mode, it shows the output of the status subcommand, and then goes into its interactive command loop.

The command loop shows the list of subcommands available, and gives a prompt "What now> ". In general, when the prompt ends with a single >, you can pick only one of the choices given and type return, like this:

    *** Commands ***
      1: status       2: update       3: revert       4: add untracked
      5: patch        6: diff         7: quit         8: help
    What now> 1

You also could say s or sta or status above as long as the choice is unique.

The main command loop has 6 subcommands (plus help and quit).

status

This shows the change between HEAD and index (i.e. what will be committed if you say git commit), and between index and working tree files (i.e. what you could stage further before git commit using git add) for each path. A sample output looks like this:

              staged     unstaged path
     1:       binary      nothing foo.png
     2:     +403/-35        +1/-1 add-interactive.c

It shows that foo.png has differences from HEAD (but that is binary so line count cannot be shown) and there is no difference between indexed copy and the working tree version (if the working tree version were also different, binary would have been shown in place of nothing). The other file, add-interactive.c, has 403 lines added and 35 lines deleted if you commit what is in the index, but working tree file has further modifications (one addition and one deletion).

update

This shows the status information and issues an "Update>>" prompt. When the prompt ends with double >>, you can make more than one selection, concatenated with whitespace or comma. Also you can say ranges. E.g. "2-5 7,9" to choose 2,3,4,5,7,9 from the list. If the second number in a range is omitted, all remaining patches are taken. E.g. "7-" to choose 7,8,9 from the list. You can say * to choose everything.

What you chose are then highlighted with *, like this:

           staged     unstaged path
  1:       binary      nothing foo.png
* 2:     +403/-35        +1/-1 add-interactive.c

To remove selection, prefix the input with - like this:

Update>> -2

After making the selection, answer with an empty line to stage the contents of working tree files for selected paths in the index.

revert
This has a very similar UI to update, and the staged information for selected paths are reverted to that of the HEAD version. Reverting new paths makes them untracked.
add untracked
This has a very similar UI to update and revert, and lets you add untracked paths to the index.
patch

This lets you choose one path out of a status like selection. After choosing the path, it presents the diff between the index and the working tree file and asks you if you want to stage the change of each hunk. You can select one of the following options and type return:

y - stage this hunk
n - do not stage this hunk
q - quit; do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones
a - stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d - do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g - select a hunk to go to
/ - search for a hunk matching the given regex
j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e - manually edit the current hunk
p - print the current hunk
? - print help

After deciding the fate for all hunks, if there is any hunk that was chosen, the index is updated with the selected hunks.

You can omit having to type return here, by setting the configuration variable interactive.singleKey to true.

diff
This lets you review what will be committed (i.e. between HEAD and index).

EDITING PATCHES

Invoking git add -e or selecting e from the interactive hunk selector will open a patch in your editor; after the editor exits, the result is applied to the index. You are free to make arbitrary changes to the patch, but note that some changes may have confusing results, or even result in a patch that cannot be applied. If you want to abort the operation entirely (i.e., stage nothing new in the index), simply delete all lines of the patch. The list below describes some common things you may see in a patch, and which editing operations make sense on them.

added content
Added content is represented by lines beginning with "+". You can prevent staging any addition lines by deleting them.
removed content
Removed content is represented by lines beginning with "-". You can prevent staging their removal by converting the "-" to a " " (space).
modified content
Modified content is represented by "-" lines (removing the old content) followed by "+" lines (adding the replacement content). You can prevent staging the modification by converting "-" lines to " ", and removing "+" lines. Beware that modifying only half of the pair is likely to introduce confusing changes to the index.

There are also more complex operations that can be performed. But beware that because the patch is applied only to the index and not the working tree, the working tree will appear to "undo" the change in the index. For example, introducing a new line into the index that is in neither the HEAD nor the working tree will stage the new line for commit, but the line will appear to be reverted in the working tree.

Avoid using these constructs, or do so with extreme caution.

removing untouched content
Content which does not differ between the index and working tree may be shown on context lines, beginning with a " " (space). You can stage context lines for removal by converting the space to a "-". The resulting working tree file will appear to re-add the content.
modifying existing content
One can also modify context lines by staging them for removal (by converting " " to "-") and adding a "+" line with the new content. Similarly, one can modify "+" lines for existing additions or modifications. In all cases, the new modification will appear reverted in the working tree.
new content
You may also add new content that does not exist in the patch; simply add new lines, each starting with "+". The addition will appear reverted in the working tree.

There are also several operations which should be avoided entirely, as they will make the patch impossible to apply:

  • adding context (" ") or removal ("-") lines
  • deleting context or removal lines
  • modifying the contents of context or removal lines

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

add.ignoreErrors , add.ignore-errors (deprecated)
Tells git add to continue adding files when some files cannot be added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the --ignore-errors option. add.ignore-errors is deprecated, as it does not follow the usual naming convention for configuration variables.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-am(1)

NAME

git-am - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox

SYNOPSIS

git am [--signoff] [--keep] [--[no-]keep-cr] [--[no-]utf8] [--no-verify]
         [--[no-]3way] [--interactive] [--committer-date-is-author-date]
         [--ignore-date] [--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
         [--whitespace=<action>] [-C<n>] [-p<n>] [--directory=<dir>]
         [--exclude=<path>] [--include=<path>] [--reject] [-q | --quiet]
         [--[no-]scissors] [-S[<keyid>]] [--patch-format=<format>]
         [--quoted-cr=<action>]
         [--empty=(stop|drop|keep)]
         [(<mbox> | <Maildir>)…]
git am (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit | --retry | --show-current-patch[=(diff|raw)] | --allow-empty)

DESCRIPTION

Splits mail messages in a mailbox into commit log messages, authorship information, and patches, and applies them to the current branch. You could think of it as a reverse operation of the section called “git-format-patch(1)” run on a branch with a straight history without merges.

OPTIONS

(<mbox>|<Maildir>)…
The list of mailbox files to read patches from. If you do not supply this argument, the command reads from the standard input. If you supply directories, they will be treated as Maildirs.
-s , --signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer to the commit message, using the committer identity of yourself. See the signoff option in the section called “git-commit(1)” for more information.
-k , --keep
Pass -k flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).
--keep-non-patch
Pass -b flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).
--[no-]keep-cr
With --keep-cr, call git mailsplit (see the section called “git-mailsplit(1)”) with the same option, to prevent it from stripping CR at the end of lines. am.keepcr configuration variable can be used to specify the default behaviour. --no-keep-cr is useful to override am.keepcr.
-c , --scissors
Remove everything in body before a scissors line (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”). Can be activated by default using the mailinfo.scissors configuration variable.
--no-scissors
Ignore scissors lines (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).
--quoted-cr=<action>
This flag will be passed down to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).
--empty=(drop|keep|stop)

How to handle an e-mail message lacking a patch:

drop
The e-mail message will be skipped.
keep
An empty commit will be created, with the contents of the e-mail message as its log.
stop
The command will fail, stopping in the middle of the current am session. This is the default behavior.
-m , --message-id
Pass the -m flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”), so that the Message-ID header is added to the commit message. The am.messageid configuration variable can be used to specify the default behaviour.
--no-message-id
Do not add the Message-ID header to the commit message. no-message-id is useful to override am.messageid.
-q , --quiet
Be quiet. Only print error messages.
-u , --utf8

Pass -u flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”). The proposed commit log message taken from the e-mail is re-coded into UTF-8 encoding (configuration variable i18n.commitEncoding can be used to specify the project's preferred encoding if it is not UTF-8).

This was optional in prior versions of git, but now it is the default. You can use --no-utf8 to override this.

--no-utf8
Pass -n flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).
-3 , --3way , --no-3way
When the patch does not apply cleanly, fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally. --no-3way can be used to override am.threeWay configuration variable. For more information, see am.threeWay in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--rerere-autoupdate , --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to also update the index with the result of resolution. --no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what rerere did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the result to the index with a separate git add.
--ignore-space-change , --ignore-whitespace , --whitespace=<action> , -C<n> , -p<n> , --directory=<dir> , --exclude=<path> , --include=<path> , --reject

These flags are passed to the git apply (see the section called “git-apply(1)”) program that applies the patch.

Valid <action> for the --whitespace option are: nowarn, warn, fix, error, and error-all.

--patch-format
By default the command will try to detect the patch format automatically. This option allows the user to bypass the automatic detection and specify the patch format that the patch(es) should be interpreted as. Valid formats are mbox, mboxrd, stgit, stgit-series, and hg.
-i , --interactive
Run interactively.
-n , --no-verify
By default, the pre-applypatch and applypatch-msg hooks are run. When any of --no-verify or -n is given, these are bypassed. See also the section called “githooks(5)”.
--committer-date-is-author-date
By default the command records the date from the e-mail message as the commit author date, and uses the time of commit creation as the committer date. This allows the user to lie about the committer date by using the same value as the author date.
--ignore-date
By default the command records the date from the e-mail message as the commit author date, and uses the time of commit creation as the committer date. This allows the user to lie about the author date by using the same value as the committer date.
--skip
Skip the current patch. This is only meaningful when restarting an aborted patch.
-S[<keyid>] , --gpg-sign[=<keyid>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
--continue , -r , --resolved
After a patch failure (e.g. attempting to apply conflicting patch), the user has applied it by hand and the index file stores the result of the application. Make a commit using the authorship and commit log extracted from the e-mail message and the current index file, and continue.
--resolvemsg=<msg>
When a patch failure occurs, <msg> will be printed to the screen before exiting. This overrides the standard message informing you to use --continue or --skip to handle the failure. This is solely for internal use between git rebase and git am.
--abort
Restore the original branch and abort the patching operation. Revert the contents of files involved in the am operation to their pre-am state.
--quit
Abort the patching operation but keep HEAD and the index untouched.
--retry
Try to apply the last conflicting patch again. This is generally only useful for passing extra options to the retry attempt (e.g., --3way), since otherwise you'll just see the same failure again.
--show-current-patch[=(diff|raw)]
Show the message at which git am has stopped due to conflicts. If raw is specified, show the raw contents of the e-mail message; if diff, show the diff portion only. Defaults to raw.
--allow-empty
After a patch failure on an input e-mail message lacking a patch, create an empty commit with the contents of the e-mail message as its log message.

DISCUSSION

The commit author name is taken from the "From: " line of the message, and commit author date is taken from the "Date: " line of the message. The "Subject: " line is used as the title of the commit, after stripping common prefix "[PATCH <anything>]". The "Subject: " line is supposed to concisely describe what the commit is about in one line of text.

"From: ", "Date: ", and "Subject: " lines starting the body override the respective commit author name and title values taken from the headers.

The commit message is formed by the title taken from the "Subject: ", a blank line and the body of the message up to where the patch begins. Excess whitespace at the end of each line is automatically stripped.

The patch is expected to be inline, directly following the message. Any line that is of the form:

  • three-dashes and end-of-line, or
  • a line that begins with "diff -", or
  • a line that begins with "Index: "

is taken as the beginning of a patch, and the commit log message is terminated before the first occurrence of such a line.

When initially invoking git am, you give it the names of the mailboxes to process. Upon seeing the first patch that does not apply, it aborts in the middle. You can recover from this in one of two ways:

  1. skip the current patch by re-running the command with the --skip option.
  2. hand resolve the conflict in the working directory, and update the index file to bring it into a state that the patch should have produced. Then run the command with the --continue option.

The command refuses to process new mailboxes until the current operation is finished, so if you decide to start over from scratch, run git am --abort before running the command with mailbox names.

Before any patches are applied, ORIG_HEAD is set to the tip of the current branch. This is useful if you have problems with multiple commits, like running git am on the wrong branch or an error in the commits that is more easily fixed by changing the mailbox (e.g. errors in the "From:" lines).

HOOKS

This command can run applypatch-msg, pre-applypatch, and post-applypatch hooks. See the section called “githooks(5)” for more information.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

am.keepcr
If true, git-am will call git-mailsplit for patches in mbox format with parameter --keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit will not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving --no-keep-cr from the command line. See the section called “git-am(1)”, the section called “git-mailsplit(1)”.
am.threeWay
By default, git am will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git am to fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally (equivalent to giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to false. See the section called “git-am(1)”.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-annotate(1)

NAME

git-annotate - Annotate file lines with commit information

SYNOPSIS

git annotate [<options>] [<rev-opts>] [<rev>] [--] <file>

DESCRIPTION

Annotates each line in the given file with information from the commit which introduced the line. Optionally annotates from a given revision.

The only difference between this command and the section called “git-blame(1)” is that they use slightly different output formats, and this command exists only for backward compatibility to support existing scripts, and provide a more familiar command name for people coming from other SCM systems.

OPTIONS

-b
Show blank SHA-1 for boundary commits. This can also be controlled via the blame.blankBoundary config option.
--root
Do not treat root commits as boundaries. This can also be controlled via the blame.showRoot config option.
--show-stats
Include additional statistics at the end of blame output.
-L <start>,<end> , -L :<funcname>

Annotate only the line range given by <start>,<end>, or by the function name regex <funcname>. May be specified multiple times. Overlapping ranges are allowed.

<start> and <end> are optional. -L <start> or -L <start>, spans from <start> to end of file. -L ,<end> spans from start of file to <end>.

<start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

  • number

    If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute line number (lines count from 1).

  • /regex/

    This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search from the start of file. If <end> is a regex, it will search starting at the line given by <start>.

  • +offset or -offset

    This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of lines before or after the line given by <start>.

If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is a regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname line that matches <funcname>, up to the next funcname line. :<funcname> searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. ^:<funcname> searches from the start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

-l
Show long rev (Default: off).
-t
Show raw timestamp (Default: off).
-S <revs-file>
Use revisions from revs-file instead of calling the section called “git-rev-list(1)”.
--reverse <rev>..<rev>
Walk history forward instead of backward. Instead of showing the revision in which a line appeared, this shows the last revision in which a line has existed. This requires a range of revision like START..END where the path to blame exists in START. git blame --reverse START is taken as git blame --reverse START..HEAD for convenience.
--first-parent
Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can be used to determine when a line was introduced to a particular integration branch, rather than when it was introduced to the history overall.
-p , --porcelain
Show in a format designed for machine consumption.
--line-porcelain
Show the porcelain format, but output commit information for each line, not just the first time a commit is referenced. Implies --porcelain.
--incremental
Show the result incrementally in a format designed for machine consumption.
--encoding=<encoding>
Specifies the encoding used to output author names and commit summaries. Setting it to none makes blame output unconverted data. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--contents <file>
Annotate using the contents from the named file, starting from <rev> if it is specified, and HEAD otherwise. You may specify - to make the command read from the standard input for the file contents.
--date <format>
Specifies the format used to output dates. If --date is not provided, the value of the blame.date config variable is used. If the blame.date config variable is also not set, the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option at the section called “git-log(1)”.
--[no-]progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a terminal. Can't use --progress together with --porcelain or --incremental.
-M[<num>]

Detect moved or copied lines within a file. When a commit moves or copies a block of lines (e.g. the original file has A and then B, and the commit changes it to B and then A), the traditional blame algorithm notices only half of the movement and typically blames the lines that were moved up (i.e. B) to the parent and assigns blame to the lines that were moved down (i.e. A) to the child commit. With this option, both groups of lines are blamed on the parent by running extra passes of inspection.

<num> is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of alphanumeric characters that Git must detect as moving/copying within a file for it to associate those lines with the parent commit. The default value is 20.

-C[<num>]

In addition to -M, detect lines moved or copied from other files that were modified in the same commit. This is useful when you reorganize your program and move code around across files. When this option is given twice, the command additionally looks for copies from other files in the commit that creates the file. When this option is given three times, the command additionally looks for copies from other files in any commit.

<num> is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of alphanumeric characters that Git must detect as moving/copying between files for it to associate those lines with the parent commit. And the default value is 40. If there are more than one -C options given, the <num> argument of the last -C will take effect.

--ignore-rev <rev>
Ignore changes made by the revision when assigning blame, as if the change never happened. Lines that were changed or added by an ignored commit will be blamed on the previous commit that changed that line or nearby lines. This option may be specified multiple times to ignore more than one revision. If the blame.markIgnoredLines config option is set, then lines that were changed by an ignored commit and attributed to another commit will be marked with a ? in the blame output. If the blame.markUnblamableLines config option is set, then those lines touched by an ignored commit that we could not attribute to another revision are marked with a *. In the porcelain modes, we print ignored and unblamable on a newline respectively.
--ignore-revs-file <file>
Ignore revisions listed in file, which must be in the same format as an fsck.skipList. This option may be repeated, and these files will be processed after any files specified with the blame.ignoreRevsFile config option. An empty file name, "", will clear the list of revs from previously processed files.
--color-lines
Color line annotations in the default format differently if they come from the same commit as the preceding line. This makes it easier to distinguish code blocks introduced by different commits. The color defaults to cyan and can be adjusted using the color.blame.repeatedLines config option.
--color-by-age
Color line annotations depending on the age of the line in the default format. The color.blame.highlightRecent config option controls what color is used for each range of age.
-h
Show help message.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-apply(1)

NAME

git-apply - Apply a patch to files and/or to the index

SYNOPSIS

git apply [--stat] [--numstat] [--summary] [--check]
          [--index | --intent-to-add] [--3way] [--ours | --theirs | --union]
          [--apply] [--no-add] [--build-fake-ancestor=<file>] [-R | --reverse]
          [--allow-binary-replacement | --binary] [--reject] [-z]
          [-p<n>] [-C<n>] [--inaccurate-eof] [--recount] [--cached]
          [--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
          [--whitespace=(nowarn|warn|fix|error|error-all)]
          [--exclude=<path>] [--include=<path>] [--directory=<root>]
          [--verbose | --quiet] [--unsafe-paths] [--allow-empty] [<patch>…]

DESCRIPTION

Reads the supplied diff output (i.e. "a patch") and applies it to files. When running from a subdirectory in a repository, patched paths outside the directory are ignored. With the --index option, the patch is also applied to the index, and with the --cached option, the patch is only applied to the index. Without these options, the command applies the patch only to files, and does not require them to be in a Git repository.

This command applies the patch but does not create a commit. Use the section called “git-am(1)” to create commits from patches generated by the section called “git-format-patch(1)” and/or received by email.

OPTIONS

<patch>…
The files to read the patch from. - can be used to read from the standard input.
--stat
Instead of applying the patch, output diffstat for the input. Turns off "apply".
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows the number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and the pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0. Turns off "apply".
--summary
Instead of applying the patch, output a condensed summary of information obtained from git diff extended headers, such as creations, renames, and mode changes. Turns off "apply".
--check
Instead of applying the patch, see if the patch is applicable to the current working tree and/or the index file and detects errors. Turns off "apply".
--index
Apply the patch to both the index and the working tree (or merely check that it would apply cleanly to both if --check is in effect). Note that --index expects index entries and working tree copies for relevant paths to be identical (their contents and metadata such as file mode must match), and will raise an error if they are not, even if the patch would apply cleanly to both the index and the working tree in isolation.
--cached
Apply the patch to just the index, without touching the working tree. If --check is in effect, merely check that it would apply cleanly to the index entry.
--intent-to-add
When applying the patch only to the working tree, mark new files to be added to the index later (see --intent-to-add option in the section called “git-add(1)”). This option is ignored unless running in a Git repository and --index is not specified. Note that --index could be implied by other options such as --cached or --3way.
-3 , --3way
Attempt 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally, possibly leaving the conflict markers in the files in the working tree for the user to resolve. This option implies the --index option unless the --cached option is used, and is incompatible with the --reject option. When used with the --cached option, any conflicts are left at higher stages in the cache.
--ours , --theirs , --union
Instead of leaving conflicts in the file, resolve conflicts favouring our (or their or both) side of the lines. Requires --3way.
--build-fake-ancestor=<file>

Newer git diff output has embedded index information for each blob to help identify the original version that the patch applies to. When this flag is given, and if the original versions of the blobs are available locally, builds a temporary index containing those blobs.

When a pure mode change is encountered (which has no index information), the information is read from the current index instead.

-R , --reverse
Apply the patch in reverse.
--reject
For atomicity, git apply by default fails the whole patch and does not touch the working tree when some of the hunks do not apply. This option makes it apply the parts of the patch that are applicable, and leave the rejected hunks in corresponding *.rej files.
-z

When --numstat has been given, do not munge pathnames, but use a NUL-terminated machine-readable format.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

-p<n>
Remove <n> leading path components (separated by slashes) from traditional diff paths. E.g., with -p2, a patch against a/dir/file will be applied directly to file. The default is 1.
-C<n>
Ensure at least <n> lines of surrounding context match before and after each change. When fewer lines of surrounding context exist they all must match. By default no context is ever ignored.
--unidiff-zero

By default, git apply expects that the patch being applied is a unified diff with at least one line of context. This provides good safety measures, but breaks down when applying a diff generated with --unified=0. To bypass these checks use --unidiff-zero.

Note, for the reasons stated above, the usage of context-free patches is discouraged.

--apply
If you use any of the options marked "Turns off apply" above, git apply reads and outputs the requested information without actually applying the patch. Give this flag after those flags to also apply the patch.
--no-add
When applying a patch, ignore additions made by the patch. This can be used to extract the common part between two files by first running diff on them and applying the result with this option, which would apply the deletion part but not the addition part.
--allow-binary-replacement , --binary
Historically we did not allow binary patch application without an explicit permission from the user, and this flag was the way to do so. Currently, we always allow binary patch application, so this is a no-op.
--exclude=<path-pattern>
Don't apply changes to files matching the given path pattern. This can be useful when importing patchsets, where you want to exclude certain files or directories.
--include=<path-pattern>

Apply changes to files matching the given path pattern. This can be useful when importing patchsets, where you want to include certain files or directories.

When --exclude and --include patterns are used, they are examined in the order they appear on the command line, and the first match determines if a patch to each path is used. A patch to a path that does not match any include/exclude pattern is used by default if there is no include pattern on the command line, and ignored if there is any include pattern.

--ignore-space-change , --ignore-whitespace
When applying a patch, ignore changes in whitespace in context lines if necessary. Context lines will preserve their whitespace, and they will not undergo whitespace fixing regardless of the value of the --whitespace option. New lines will still be fixed, though.
--whitespace=<action>

When applying a patch, detect a new or modified line that has whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that solely consist of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors.

By default, the command outputs warning messages but applies the patch. When git-apply is used for statistics and not applying a patch, it defaults to nowarn.

You can use different <action> values to control this behavior:

  • nowarn turns off the trailing whitespace warning.
  • warn outputs warnings for a few such errors, but applies the patch as-is (default).
  • fix outputs warnings for a few such errors, and applies the patch after fixing them (strip is a synonym -- the tool used to consider only trailing whitespace characters as errors, and the fix involved stripping them, but modern Gits do more).
  • error outputs warnings for a few such errors, and refuses to apply the patch.
  • error-all is similar to error but shows all errors.
--inaccurate-eof
Under certain circumstances, some versions of diff do not correctly detect a missing new-line at the end of the file. As a result, patches created by such diff programs do not record incomplete lines correctly. This option adds support for applying such patches by working around this bug.
-v , --verbose
Report progress to stderr. By default, only a message about the current patch being applied will be printed. This option will cause additional information to be reported.
-q , --quiet
Suppress stderr output. Messages about patch status and progress will not be printed.
--recount
Do not trust the line counts in the hunk headers, but infer them by inspecting the patch (e.g. after editing the patch without adjusting the hunk headers appropriately).
--directory=<root>

Prepend <root> to all filenames. If a "-p" argument was also passed, it is applied before prepending the new root.

For example, a patch that talks about updating a/git-gui.sh to b/git-gui.sh can be applied to the file in the working tree modules/git-gui/git-gui.sh by running git apply --directory=modules/git-gui.

--unsafe-paths

By default, a patch that affects outside the working area (either a Git controlled working tree, or the current working directory when "git apply" is used as a replacement of GNU patch) is rejected as a mistake (or a mischief).

When git apply is used as a "better GNU patch", the user can pass the --unsafe-paths option to override this safety check. This option has no effect when --index or --cached is in use.

--allow-empty
Don't return an error for patches containing no diff. This includes empty patches and patches with commit text only.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

apply.ignoreWhitespace
When set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false, it tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See the section called “git-apply(1)”.
apply.whitespace
Tells git apply how to handle whitespace, in the same way as the --whitespace option. See the section called “git-apply(1)”.

SUBMODULES

If the patch contains any changes to submodules then git apply treats these changes as follows.

If --index is specified (explicitly or implicitly), then the submodule commits must match the index exactly for the patch to apply. If any of the submodules are checked-out, then these check-outs are completely ignored, i.e., they are not required to be up to date or clean and they are not updated.

If --index is not specified, then the submodule commits in the patch are ignored and only the absence or presence of the corresponding subdirectory is checked and (if possible) updated.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-archimport(1)

NAME

git-archimport - Import a GNU Arch repository into Git

SYNOPSIS

git archimport [-h] [-v] [-o] [-a] [-f] [-T] [-D <depth>] [-t <tempdir>]
               <archive>/<branch>[:<git-branch>]…

DESCRIPTION

Imports a project from one or more GNU Arch repositories. It will follow branches and repositories within the namespaces defined by the <archive>/<branch> parameters supplied. If it cannot find the remote branch a merge comes from it will just import it as a regular commit. If it can find it, it will mark it as a merge whenever possible (see discussion below).

The script expects you to provide the key roots where it can start the import from an initial import or tag type of Arch commit. It will follow and import new branches within the provided roots.

It expects to be dealing with one project only. If it sees branches that have different roots, it will refuse to run. In that case, edit your <archive>/<branch> parameters to define clearly the scope of the import.

git archimport uses tla extensively in the background to access the Arch repository. Make sure you have a recent version of tla available in the path. tla must know about the repositories you pass to git archimport.

For the initial import, git archimport expects to find itself in an empty directory. To follow the development of a project that uses Arch, rerun git archimport with the same parameters as the initial import to perform incremental imports.

While git archimport will try to create sensible branch names for the archives that it imports, it is also possible to specify Git branch names manually. To do so, write a Git branch name after each <archive>/<branch> parameter, separated by a colon. This way, you can shorten the Arch branch names and convert Arch jargon to Git jargon, for example mapping a "PROJECT--devo--VERSION" branch to "master".

Associating multiple Arch branches to one Git branch is possible; the result will make the most sense only if no commits are made to the first branch, after the second branch is created. Still, this is useful to convert Arch repositories that had been rotated periodically.

MERGES

Patch merge data from Arch is used to mark merges in Git as well. Git does not care much about tracking patches, and only considers a merge when a branch incorporates all the commits since the point they forked. The end result is that Git will have a good idea of how far branches have diverged. So the import process does lose some patch-trading metadata.

Fortunately, when you try and merge branches imported from Arch, Git will find a good merge base, and it has a good chance of identifying patches that have been traded out-of-sequence between the branches.

OPTIONS

-h
Display usage.
-v
Verbose output.
-T
Many tags. Will create a tag for every commit, reflecting the commit name in the Arch repository.
-f
Use the fast patchset import strategy. This can be significantly faster for large trees, but cannot handle directory renames or permissions changes. The default strategy is slow and safe.
-o
Use this for compatibility with old-style branch names used by earlier versions of git archimport. Old-style branch names were category--branch, whereas new-style branch names are archive,category--branch--version. In both cases, names given on the command-line will override the automatically-generated ones.
-D <depth>
Follow merge ancestry and attempt to import trees that have been merged from. Specify a depth greater than 1 if patch logs have been pruned.
-a
Attempt to auto-register archives at http://mirrors.sourcecontrol.net This is particularly useful with the -D option.
-t <tmpdir>
Override the default tempdir.
<archive>/<branch>
<archive>/<branch> identifier in a format that tla log understands.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-archive(1)

NAME

git-archive - Create an archive of files from a named tree

SYNOPSIS

git archive [--format=<fmt>] [--list] [--prefix=<prefix>/] [<extra>]
              [-o <file> | --output=<file>] [--worktree-attributes]
              [--remote=<repo> [--exec=<git-upload-archive>]] <tree-ish>
              [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Creates an archive of the specified format containing the tree structure for the named tree, and writes it out to the standard output. If <prefix> is specified it is prepended to the filenames in the archive.

git archive behaves differently when given a tree ID as opposed to a commit ID or tag ID. When a tree ID is provided, the current time is used as the modification time of each file in the archive. On the other hand, when a commit ID or tag ID is provided, the commit time as recorded in the referenced commit object is used instead. Additionally the commit ID is stored in a global extended pax header if the tar format is used; it can be extracted using git get-tar-commit-id. In ZIP files it is stored as a file comment.

OPTIONS

--format=<fmt>
Format of the resulting archive. Possible values are tar, zip, tar.gz, tgz, and any format defined using the configuration option tar.<format>.command. If --format is not given, and the output file is specified, the format is inferred from the filename if possible (e.g. writing to foo.zip makes the output to be in the zip format). Otherwise the output format is tar.
-l , --list
Show all available formats.
-v , --verbose
Report progress to stderr.
--prefix=<prefix>/
Prepend <prefix>/ to paths in the archive. Can be repeated; its rightmost value is used for all tracked files. See below which value gets used by --add-file.
-o <file> , --output=<file>
Write the archive to <file> instead of stdout.
--add-file=<file>
Add a non-tracked file to the archive. Can be repeated to add multiple files. The path of the file in the archive is built by concatenating the value of the last --prefix option (if any) before this --add-file and the basename of <file>.
--add-virtual-file=<path>:<content>

Add the specified contents to the archive. Can be repeated to add multiple files.

The <path> argument can start and end with a literal double-quote character; the contained file name is interpreted as a C-style string, i.e. the backslash is interpreted as escape character. The path must be quoted if it contains a colon, to avoid the colon from being misinterpreted as the separator between the path and the contents, or if the path begins or ends with a double-quote character.

The file mode is limited to a regular file, and the option may be subject to platform-dependent command-line limits. For non-trivial cases, write an untracked file and use --add-file instead.

Note that unlike --add-file the path created in the archive is not affected by the --prefix option, as a full <path> can be given as the value of the option.

--worktree-attributes
Look for attributes in .gitattributes files in the working tree as well (see the section called “ATTRIBUTES”).
--mtime=<time>
Set modification time of archive entries. Without this option the committer time is used if <tree-ish> is a commit or tag, and the current time if it is a tree.
<extra>
This can be any options that the archiver backend understands. See next section.
--remote=<repo>
Instead of making a tar archive from the local repository, retrieve a tar archive from a remote repository. Note that the remote repository may place restrictions on which sha1 expressions may be allowed in <tree-ish>. See the section called “git-upload-archive(1)” for details.
--exec=<git-upload-archive>
Used with --remote to specify the path to the git-upload-archive on the remote side.
<tree-ish>
The tree or commit to produce an archive for.
<path>
Without an optional path parameter, all files and subdirectories of the current working directory are included in the archive. If one or more paths are specified, only these are included.

BACKEND EXTRA OPTIONS

zip

-<digit>
Specify compression level. Larger values allow the command to spend more time to compress to smaller size. Supported values are from -0 (store-only) to -9 (best ratio). Default is -6 if not given.

tar

-<number>
Specify compression level. The value will be passed to the compression command configured in tar.<format>.command. See manual page of the configured command for the list of supported levels and the default level if this option isn't specified.

CONFIGURATION

tar.umask
This variable can be used to restrict the permission bits of tar archive entries. The default is 0002, which turns off the world write bit. The special value "user" indicates that the archiving user's umask will be used instead. See umask(2) for details. If --remote is used then only the configuration of the remote repository takes effect.
tar.<format>.command

This variable specifies a shell command through which the tar output generated by git archive should be piped. The command is executed using the shell with the generated tar file on its standard input, and should produce the final output on its standard output. Any compression-level options will be passed to the command (e.g., -9).

The tar.gz and tgz formats are defined automatically and use the magic command git archive gzip by default, which invokes an internal implementation of gzip.

tar.<format>.remote
If true, enable the format for use by remote clients via the section called “git-upload-archive(1)”. Defaults to false for user-defined formats, but true for the tar.gz and tgz formats.

ATTRIBUTES

export-ignore
Files and directories with the attribute export-ignore won't be added to archive files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
export-subst
If the attribute export-subst is set for a file then Git will expand several placeholders when adding this file to an archive. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.

Note that attributes are by default taken from the .gitattributes files in the tree that is being archived. If you want to tweak the way the output is generated after the fact (e.g. you committed without adding an appropriate export-ignore in its .gitattributes), adjust the checked out .gitattributes file as necessary and use --worktree-attributes option. Alternatively you can keep necessary attributes that should apply while archiving any tree in your $GIT_DIR/info/attributes file.

EXAMPLES

git archive --format=tar --prefix=junk/ HEAD | (cd /var/tmp/ && tar xf -)
Create a tar archive that contains the contents of the latest commit on the current branch, and extract it in the /var/tmp/junk directory.
git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0 | gzip >git-1.4.0.tar.gz
Create a compressed tarball for v1.4.0 release.
git archive --format=tar.gz --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0 >git-1.4.0.tar.gz
Same as above, but using the builtin tar.gz handling.
git archive --prefix=git-1.4.0/ -o git-1.4.0.tar.gz v1.4.0
Same as above, but the format is inferred from the output file.
git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0^{tree} | gzip >git-1.4.0.tar.gz
Create a compressed tarball for v1.4.0 release, but without a global extended pax header.
git archive --format=zip --prefix=git-docs/ HEAD:Documentation/ > git-1.4.0-docs.zip
Put everything in the current head's Documentation/ directory into git-1.4.0-docs.zip, with the prefix git-docs/.
git archive -o latest.zip HEAD
Create a Zip archive that contains the contents of the latest commit on the current branch. Note that the output format is inferred by the extension of the output file.
git archive -o latest.tar --prefix=build/ --add-file=configure --prefix= HEAD
Creates a tar archive that contains the contents of the latest commit on the current branch with no prefix and the untracked file configure with the prefix build/.
git config tar.tar.xz.command "xz -c"
Configure a "tar.xz" format for making LZMA-compressed tarfiles. You can use it specifying --format=tar.xz, or by creating an output file like -o foo.tar.xz.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-backfill(1)

NAME

git-backfill - Download missing objects in a partial clone

SYNOPSIS

git backfill [--min-batch-size=<n>] [--[no-]sparse]

DESCRIPTION

Blobless partial clones are created using git clone --filter=blob:none and then configure the local repository such that the Git client avoids downloading blob objects unless they are required for a local operation. This initially means that the clone and later fetches download reachable commits and trees but no blobs. Later operations that change the HEAD pointer, such as git checkout or git merge, may need to download missing blobs in order to complete their operation.

In the worst cases, commands that compute blob diffs, such as git blame, become very slow as they download the missing blobs in single-blob requests to satisfy the missing object as the Git command needs it. This leads to multiple download requests and no ability for the Git server to provide delta compression across those objects.

The git backfill command provides a way for the user to request that Git downloads the missing blobs (with optional filters) such that the missing blobs representing historical versions of files can be downloaded in batches. The backfill command attempts to optimize the request by grouping blobs that appear at the same path, hopefully leading to good delta compression in the packfile sent by the server.

In this way, git backfill provides a mechanism to break a large clone into smaller chunks. Starting with a blobless partial clone with git clone --filter=blob:none and then running git backfill in the local repository provides a way to download all reachable objects in several smaller network calls than downloading the entire repository at clone time.

By default, git backfill downloads all blobs reachable from the HEAD commit. This set can be restricted or expanded using various options.

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. ITS BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE IN THE FUTURE.

OPTIONS

--min-batch-size=<n>
Specify a minimum size for a batch of missing objects to request from the server. This size may be exceeded by the last set of blobs seen at a given path. The default minimum batch size is 50,000.
--[no-]sparse
Only download objects if they appear at a path that matches the current sparse-checkout. If the sparse-checkout feature is enabled, then --sparse is assumed and can be disabled with --no-sparse.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-bisect(1)

NAME

git-bisect - Use binary search to find the commit that introduced a bug

SYNOPSIS

git bisect <subcommand> <options>

DESCRIPTION

The command takes various subcommands, and different options depending on the subcommand:

git bisect start [--term-(bad|new)=<term-new> --term-(good|old)=<term-old>]
                 [--no-checkout] [--first-parent] [<bad> [<good>...]] [--] [<pathspec>...]
git bisect (bad|new|<term-new>) [<rev>]
git bisect (good|old|<term-old>) [<rev>...]
git bisect terms [--term-(good|old) | --term-(bad|new)]
git bisect skip [(<rev>|<range>)...]
git bisect reset [<commit>]
git bisect (visualize|view)
git bisect replay <logfile>
git bisect log
git bisect run <cmd> [<arg>...]
git bisect help

This command uses a binary search algorithm to find which commit in your project's history introduced a bug. You use it by first telling it a "bad" commit that is known to contain the bug, and a "good" commit that is known to be before the bug was introduced. Then git bisect picks a commit between those two endpoints and asks you whether the selected commit is "good" or "bad". It continues narrowing down the range until it finds the exact commit that introduced the change.

In fact, git bisect can be used to find the commit that changed any property of your project; e.g., the commit that fixed a bug, or the commit that caused a benchmark's performance to improve. To support this more general usage, the terms "old" and "new" can be used in place of "good" and "bad", or you can choose your own terms. See section "Alternate terms" below for more information.

Basic bisect commands: start, bad, good

As an example, suppose you are trying to find the commit that broke a feature that was known to work in version v2.6.13-rc2 of your project. You start a bisect session as follows:

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect bad                 # Current version is bad
$ git bisect good v2.6.13-rc2    # v2.6.13-rc2 is known to be good

Once you have specified at least one bad and one good commit, git bisect selects a commit in the middle of that range of history, checks it out, and outputs something similar to the following:

Bisecting: 675 revisions left to test after this (roughly 10 steps)

You should now compile the checked-out version and test it. If that version works correctly, type

$ git bisect good

If that version is broken, type

$ git bisect bad

Then git bisect will respond with something like

Bisecting: 337 revisions left to test after this (roughly 9 steps)

Keep repeating the process: compile the tree, test it, and depending on whether it is good or bad run git bisect good or git bisect bad to ask for the next commit that needs testing.

Eventually there will be no more revisions left to inspect, and the command will print out a description of the first bad commit. The reference refs/bisect/bad will be left pointing at that commit.

Bisect reset

After a bisect session, to clean up the bisection state and return to the original HEAD, issue the following command:

$ git bisect reset

By default, this will return your tree to the commit that was checked out before git bisect start. (A new git bisect start will also do that, as it cleans up the old bisection state.)

With an optional argument, you can return to a different commit instead:

$ git bisect reset <commit>

For example, git bisect reset bisect/bad will check out the first bad revision, while git bisect reset HEAD will leave you on the current bisection commit and avoid switching commits at all.

Alternate terms

Sometimes you are not looking for the commit that introduced a breakage, but rather for a commit that caused a change between some other "old" state and "new" state. For example, you might be looking for the commit that introduced a particular fix. Or you might be looking for the first commit in which the source-code filenames were finally all converted to your company's naming standard. Or whatever.

In such cases it can be very confusing to use the terms "good" and "bad" to refer to "the state before the change" and "the state after the change". So instead, you can use the terms "old" and "new", respectively, in place of "good" and "bad". (But note that you cannot mix "good" and "bad" with "old" and "new" in a single session.)

In this more general usage, you provide git bisect with a "new" commit that has some property and an "old" commit that doesn't have that property. Each time git bisect checks out a commit, you test if that commit has the property. If it does, mark the commit as "new"; otherwise, mark it as "old". When the bisection is done, git bisect will report which commit introduced the property.

To use "old" and "new" instead of "good" and bad, you must run git bisect start without commits as argument and then run the following commands to add the commits:

git bisect old [<rev>]

to indicate that a commit was before the sought change, or

git bisect new [<rev>...]

to indicate that it was after.

To get a reminder of the currently used terms, use

git bisect terms

You can get just the old term with git bisect terms --term-old or git bisect terms --term-good; git bisect terms --term-new and git bisect terms --term-bad can be used to learn how to call the commits more recent than the sought change.

If you would like to use your own terms instead of "bad"/"good" or "new"/"old", you can choose any names you like (except existing bisect subcommands like reset, start, …) by starting the bisection using

git bisect start --term-old <term-old> --term-new <term-new>

For example, if you are looking for a commit that introduced a performance regression, you might use

git bisect start --term-old fast --term-new slow

Or if you are looking for the commit that fixed a bug, you might use

git bisect start --term-new fixed --term-old broken

Then, use git bisect <term-old> and git bisect <term-new> instead of git bisect good and git bisect bad to mark commits.

Bisect visualize/view

To see the currently remaining suspects in gitk, issue the following command during the bisection process (the subcommand view can be used as an alternative to visualize):

$ git bisect visualize

Git detects a graphical environment through various environment variables: DISPLAY, which is set in X Window System environments on Unix systems. SESSIONNAME, which is set under Cygwin in interactive desktop sessions. MSYSTEM, which is set under Msys2 and Git for Windows. SECURITYSESSIONID, which may be set on macOS in interactive desktop sessions.

If none of these environment variables is set, git log is used instead. You can also give command-line options such as -p and --stat.

$ git bisect visualize --stat

Bisect log and bisect replay

After having marked revisions as good or bad, issue the following command to show what has been done so far:

$ git bisect log

If you discover that you made a mistake in specifying the status of a revision, you can save the output of this command to a file, edit it to remove the incorrect entries, and then issue the following commands to return to a corrected state:

$ git bisect reset
$ git bisect replay that-file

Avoiding testing a commit

If, in the middle of a bisect session, you know that the suggested revision is not a good one to test (e.g. it fails to build and you know that the failure does not have anything to do with the bug you are chasing), you can manually select a nearby commit and test that one instead.

For example:

$ git bisect good/bad                   # previous round was good or bad.
Bisecting: 337 revisions left to test after this (roughly 9 steps)
$ git bisect visualize                  # oops, that is uninteresting.
$ git reset --hard HEAD~3               # try 3 revisions before what
                                        # was suggested

Then compile and test the chosen revision, and afterwards mark the revision as good or bad in the usual manner.

Bisect skip

Instead of choosing a nearby commit by yourself, you can ask Git to do it for you by issuing the command:

$ git bisect skip                 # Current version cannot be tested

However, if you skip a commit adjacent to the one you are looking for, Git will be unable to tell exactly which of those commits was the first bad one.

You can also skip a range of commits, instead of just one commit, using range notation. For example:

$ git bisect skip v2.5..v2.6

This tells the bisect process that no commit after v2.5, up to and including v2.6, should be tested.

Note that if you also want to skip the first commit of the range you would issue the command:

$ git bisect skip v2.5 v2.5..v2.6

This tells the bisect process that the commits between v2.5 and v2.6 (inclusive) should be skipped.

Cutting down bisection by giving more parameters to bisect start

You can further cut down the number of trials, if you know what part of the tree is involved in the problem you are tracking down, by specifying pathspec parameters when issuing the bisect start command:

$ git bisect start -- arch/i386 include/asm-i386

If you know beforehand more than one good commit, you can narrow the bisect space down by specifying all of the good commits immediately after the bad commit when issuing the bisect start command:

$ git bisect start v2.6.20-rc6 v2.6.20-rc4 v2.6.20-rc1 --
                   # v2.6.20-rc6 is bad
                   # v2.6.20-rc4 and v2.6.20-rc1 are good

Bisect run

If you have a script that can tell if the current source code is good or bad, you can bisect by issuing the command:

$ git bisect run my_script arguments

Note that the script (my_script in the above example) should exit with code 0 if the current source code is good/old, and exit with a code between 1 and 127 (inclusive), except 125, if the current source code is bad/new.

Any other exit code will abort the bisect process. It should be noted that a program that terminates via exit(-1) leaves $? = 255, (see the exit(3) manual page), as the value is chopped with & 0377.

The special exit code 125 should be used when the current source code cannot be tested. If the script exits with this code, the current revision will be skipped (see git bisect skip above). 125 was chosen as the highest sensible value to use for this purpose, because 126 and 127 are used by POSIX shells to signal specific error status (127 is for command not found, 126 is for command found but not executable--these details do not matter, as they are normal errors in the script, as far as bisect run is concerned).

You may often find that during a bisect session you want to have temporary modifications (e.g. s/#define DEBUG 0/#define DEBUG 1/ in a header file, or "revision that does not have this commit needs this patch applied to work around another problem this bisection is not interested in") applied to the revision being tested.

To cope with such a situation, after the inner git bisect finds the next revision to test, the script can apply the patch before compiling, run the real test, and afterwards decide if the revision (possibly with the needed patch) passed the test and then rewind the tree to the pristine state. Finally the script should exit with the status of the real test to let the git bisect run command loop determine the eventual outcome of the bisect session.

OPTIONS

--no-checkout

Do not checkout the new working tree at each iteration of the bisection process. Instead just update the reference named BISECT_HEAD to make it point to the commit that should be tested.

This option may be useful when the test you would perform in each step does not require a checked out tree.

If the repository is bare, --no-checkout is assumed.

--first-parent

Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit.

In detecting regressions introduced through the merging of a branch, the merge commit will be identified as introduction of the bug and its ancestors will be ignored.

This option is particularly useful in avoiding false positives when a merged branch contained broken or non-buildable commits, but the merge itself was OK.

EXAMPLES

  • Automatically bisect a broken build between v1.2 and HEAD:

    $ git bisect start HEAD v1.2 --      # HEAD is bad, v1.2 is good
    $ git bisect run make                # "make" builds the app
    $ git bisect reset                   # quit the bisect session
  • Automatically bisect a test failure between origin and HEAD:

    $ git bisect start HEAD origin --    # HEAD is bad, origin is good
    $ git bisect run make test           # "make test" builds and tests
    $ git bisect reset                   # quit the bisect session
  • Automatically bisect a broken test case:

    $ cat ~/test.sh
    #!/bin/sh
    make || exit 125                     # this skips broken builds
    ~/check_test_case.sh                 # does the test case pass?
    $ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 --   # culprit is among the last 10
    $ git bisect run ~/test.sh
    $ git bisect reset                   # quit the bisect session

    Here we use a test.sh custom script. In this script, if make fails, we skip the current commit. check_test_case.sh should exit 0 if the test case passes, and exit 1 otherwise.

    It is safer if both test.sh and check_test_case.sh are outside the repository to prevent interactions between the bisect, make and test processes and the scripts.

  • Automatically bisect with temporary modifications (hot-fix):

    $ cat ~/test.sh
    #!/bin/sh
    
    # tweak the working tree by merging the hot-fix branch
    # and then attempt a build
    if      git merge --no-commit --no-ff hot-fix &&
            make
    then
            # run project specific test and report its status
            ~/check_test_case.sh
            status=$?
    else
            # tell the caller this is untestable
            status=125
    fi
    
    # undo the tweak to allow clean flipping to the next commit
    git reset --hard
    
    # return control
    exit $status

    This applies modifications from a hot-fix branch before each test run, e.g. in case your build or test environment changed so that older revisions may need a fix which newer ones have already. (Make sure the hot-fix branch is based off a commit which is contained in all revisions which you are bisecting, so that the merge does not pull in too much, or use git cherry-pick instead of git merge.)

  • Automatically bisect a broken test case:

    $ git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 --   # culprit is among the last 10
    $ git bisect run sh -c "make || exit 125; ~/check_test_case.sh"
    $ git bisect reset                   # quit the bisect session

    This shows that you can do without a run script if you write the test on a single line.

  • Locate a good region of the object graph in a damaged repository

    $ git bisect start HEAD <known-good-commit> [ <boundary-commit> ... ] --no-checkout
    $ git bisect run sh -c '
            GOOD=$(git for-each-ref "--format=%(objectname)" refs/bisect/good-*) &&
            git rev-list --objects BISECT_HEAD --not $GOOD >tmp.$$ &&
            git pack-objects --stdout >/dev/null <tmp.$$
            rc=$?
            rm -f tmp.$$
            test $rc = 0'
    
    $ git bisect reset                   # quit the bisect session

    In this case, when git bisect run finishes, bisect/bad will refer to a commit that has at least one parent whose reachable graph is fully traversable in the sense required by git pack objects.

  • Look for a fix instead of a regression in the code

    $ git bisect start
    $ git bisect new HEAD    # current commit is marked as new
    $ git bisect old HEAD~10 # the tenth commit from now is marked as old

    or:

    $ git bisect start --term-old broken --term-new fixed
    $ git bisect fixed
    $ git bisect broken HEAD~10

Getting help

Use git bisect to get a short usage description, and git bisect help or git bisect -h to get a long usage description.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-blame(1)

NAME

git-blame - Show what revision and author last modified each line of a file

SYNOPSIS

git blame [-c] [-b] [-l] [--root] [-t] [-f] [-n] [-s] [-e] [-p] [-w] [--incremental]
            [-L <range>] [-S <revs-file>] [-M] [-C] [-C] [-C] [--since=<date>]
            [--ignore-rev <rev>] [--ignore-revs-file <file>]
            [--color-lines] [--color-by-age] [--progress] [--abbrev=<n>]
            [ --contents <file> ] [<rev> | --reverse <rev>..<rev>] [--] <file>

DESCRIPTION

Annotates each line in the given file with information from the revision which last modified the line. Optionally, start annotating from the given revision.

When specified one or more times, -L restricts annotation to the requested lines.

The origin of lines is automatically followed across whole-file renames (currently there is no option to turn the rename-following off). To follow lines moved from one file to another, or to follow lines that were copied and pasted from another file, etc., see the -C and -M options.

The report does not tell you anything about lines which have been deleted or replaced; you need to use a tool such as git diff or the "pickaxe" interface briefly mentioned in the following paragraph.

Apart from supporting file annotation, Git also supports searching the development history for when a code snippet occurred in a change. This makes it possible to track when a code snippet was added to a file, moved or copied between files, and eventually deleted or replaced. It works by searching for a text string in the diff. A small example of the pickaxe interface that searches for blame_usage:

$ git log --pretty=oneline -S'blame_usage'
5040f17eba15504bad66b14a645bddd9b015ebb7 blame -S <ancestry-file>
ea4c7f9bf69e781dd0cd88d2bccb2bf5cc15c9a7 git-blame: Make the output

OPTIONS

-b
Show blank SHA-1 for boundary commits. This can also be controlled via the blame.blankBoundary config option.
--root
Do not treat root commits as boundaries. This can also be controlled via the blame.showRoot config option.
--show-stats
Include additional statistics at the end of blame output.
-L <start>,<end> , -L :<funcname>

Annotate only the line range given by <start>,<end>, or by the function name regex <funcname>. May be specified multiple times. Overlapping ranges are allowed.

<start> and <end> are optional. -L <start> or -L <start>, spans from <start> to end of file. -L ,<end> spans from start of file to <end>.

<start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

  • number

    If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute line number (lines count from 1).

  • /regex/

    This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search from the start of file. If <end> is a regex, it will search starting at the line given by <start>.

  • +offset or -offset

    This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of lines before or after the line given by <start>.

If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is a regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname line that matches <funcname>, up to the next funcname line. :<funcname> searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. ^:<funcname> searches from the start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

-l
Show long rev (Default: off).
-t
Show raw timestamp (Default: off).
-S <revs-file>
Use revisions from revs-file instead of calling the section called “git-rev-list(1)”.
--reverse <rev>..<rev>
Walk history forward instead of backward. Instead of showing the revision in which a line appeared, this shows the last revision in which a line has existed. This requires a range of revision like START..END where the path to blame exists in START. git blame --reverse START is taken as git blame --reverse START..HEAD for convenience.
--first-parent
Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can be used to determine when a line was introduced to a particular integration branch, rather than when it was introduced to the history overall.
-p , --porcelain
Show in a format designed for machine consumption.
--line-porcelain
Show the porcelain format, but output commit information for each line, not just the first time a commit is referenced. Implies --porcelain.
--incremental
Show the result incrementally in a format designed for machine consumption.
--encoding=<encoding>
Specifies the encoding used to output author names and commit summaries. Setting it to none makes blame output unconverted data. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--contents <file>
Annotate using the contents from the named file, starting from <rev> if it is specified, and HEAD otherwise. You may specify - to make the command read from the standard input for the file contents.
--date <format>
Specifies the format used to output dates. If --date is not provided, the value of the blame.date config variable is used. If the blame.date config variable is also not set, the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option at the section called “git-log(1)”.
--[no-]progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a terminal. Can't use --progress together with --porcelain or --incremental.
-M[<num>]

Detect moved or copied lines within a file. When a commit moves or copies a block of lines (e.g. the original file has A and then B, and the commit changes it to B and then A), the traditional blame algorithm notices only half of the movement and typically blames the lines that were moved up (i.e. B) to the parent and assigns blame to the lines that were moved down (i.e. A) to the child commit. With this option, both groups of lines are blamed on the parent by running extra passes of inspection.

<num> is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of alphanumeric characters that Git must detect as moving/copying within a file for it to associate those lines with the parent commit. The default value is 20.

-C[<num>]

In addition to -M, detect lines moved or copied from other files that were modified in the same commit. This is useful when you reorganize your program and move code around across files. When this option is given twice, the command additionally looks for copies from other files in the commit that creates the file. When this option is given three times, the command additionally looks for copies from other files in any commit.

<num> is optional but it is the lower bound on the number of alphanumeric characters that Git must detect as moving/copying between files for it to associate those lines with the parent commit. And the default value is 40. If there are more than one -C options given, the <num> argument of the last -C will take effect.

--ignore-rev <rev>
Ignore changes made by the revision when assigning blame, as if the change never happened. Lines that were changed or added by an ignored commit will be blamed on the previous commit that changed that line or nearby lines. This option may be specified multiple times to ignore more than one revision. If the blame.markIgnoredLines config option is set, then lines that were changed by an ignored commit and attributed to another commit will be marked with a ? in the blame output. If the blame.markUnblamableLines config option is set, then those lines touched by an ignored commit that we could not attribute to another revision are marked with a *. In the porcelain modes, we print ignored and unblamable on a newline respectively.
--ignore-revs-file <file>
Ignore revisions listed in file, which must be in the same format as an fsck.skipList. This option may be repeated, and these files will be processed after any files specified with the blame.ignoreRevsFile config option. An empty file name, "", will clear the list of revs from previously processed files.
--color-lines
Color line annotations in the default format differently if they come from the same commit as the preceding line. This makes it easier to distinguish code blocks introduced by different commits. The color defaults to cyan and can be adjusted using the color.blame.repeatedLines config option.
--color-by-age
Color line annotations depending on the age of the line in the default format. The color.blame.highlightRecent config option controls what color is used for each range of age.
-h
Show help message.
-c
Use the same output mode as the section called “git-annotate(1)” (Default: off).
--score-debug
Include debugging information related to the movement of lines between files (see -C) and lines moved within a file (see -M). The first number listed is the score. This is the number of alphanumeric characters detected as having been moved between or within files. This must be above a certain threshold for git blame to consider those lines of code to have been moved.
-f , --show-name
Show the filename in the original commit. By default the filename is shown if there is any line that came from a file with a different name, due to rename detection.
-n , --show-number
Show the line number in the original commit (Default: off).
-s
Suppress the author name and timestamp from the output.
-e , --show-email
Show the author email instead of the author name (Default: off). This can also be controlled via the blame.showEmail config option.
-w
Ignore whitespace when comparing the parent's version and the child's to find where the lines came from.
--abbrev=<n>
Instead of using the default 7+1 hexadecimal digits as the abbreviated object name, use <m>+1 digits, where <m> is at least <n> but ensures the commit object names are unique. Note that 1 column is used for a caret to mark the boundary commit.

THE DEFAULT FORMAT

When neither --porcelain nor --incremental option is specified, git blame will output annotation for each line with:

  • abbreviated object name for the commit the line came from;
  • author ident (by default the author name and date, unless -s or -e is specified); and
  • line number

before the line contents.

THE PORCELAIN FORMAT

In this format, each line is output after a header; the header at the minimum has the first line which has:

  • 40-byte SHA-1 of the commit the line is attributed to;
  • the line number of the line in the original file;
  • the line number of the line in the final file;
  • on a line that starts a group of lines from a different commit than the previous one, the number of lines in this group. On subsequent lines this field is absent.

This header line is followed by the following information at least once for each commit:

  • the author name ("author"), email ("author-mail"), time ("author-time"), and time zone ("author-tz"); similarly for committer.
  • the filename in the commit that the line is attributed to.
  • the first line of the commit log message ("summary").

The contents of the actual line are output after the above header, prefixed by a TAB. This is to allow adding more header elements later.

The porcelain format generally suppresses commit information that has already been seen. For example, two lines that are blamed to the same commit will both be shown, but the details for that commit will be shown only once. Information which is specific to individual lines will not be grouped together, like revs to be marked ignored or unblamable. This is more efficient, but may require more state be kept by the reader. The --line-porcelain option can be used to output full commit information for each line, allowing simpler (but less efficient) usage like:

# count the number of lines attributed to each author
git blame --line-porcelain file |
sed -n 's/^author //p' |
sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

SPECIFYING RANGES

Unlike git blame and git annotate in older versions of git, the extent of the annotation can be limited to both line ranges and revision ranges. The -L option, which limits annotation to a range of lines, may be specified multiple times.

When you are interested in finding the origin for lines 40-60 for file foo, you can use the -L option like so (they mean the same thing -- both ask for 21 lines starting at line 40):

git blame -L 40,60 foo
git blame -L 40,+21 foo

Also you can use a regular expression to specify the line range:

git blame -L '/^sub hello {/,/^}$/' foo

which limits the annotation to the body of the hello subroutine.

When you are not interested in changes older than version v2.6.18, or changes older than 3 weeks, you can use revision range specifiers similar to git rev-list:

git blame v2.6.18.. -- foo
git blame --since=3.weeks -- foo

When revision range specifiers are used to limit the annotation, lines that have not changed since the range boundary (either the commit v2.6.18 or the most recent commit that is more than 3 weeks old in the above example) are blamed for that range boundary commit.

A particularly useful way is to see if an added file has lines created by copy-and-paste from existing files. Sometimes this indicates that the developer was being sloppy and did not refactor the code properly. You can first find the commit that introduced the file with:

git log --diff-filter=A --pretty=short -- foo

and then annotate the change between the commit and its parents, using commit^! notation:

git blame -C -C -f $commit^! -- foo

INCREMENTAL OUTPUT

When called with --incremental option, the command outputs the result as it is built. The output generally will talk about lines touched by more recent commits first (i.e. the lines will be annotated out of order) and is meant to be used by interactive viewers.

The output format is similar to the Porcelain format, but it does not contain the actual lines from the file that is being annotated.

  1. Each blame entry always starts with a line of:

    <40-byte-hex-sha1> <sourceline> <resultline> <num-lines>

    Line numbers count from 1.

  2. The first time that a commit shows up in the stream, it has various other information about it printed out with a one-word tag at the beginning of each line describing the extra commit information (author, email, committer, dates, summary, etc.).
  3. Unlike the Porcelain format, the filename information is always given and terminates the entry:

    "filename" <whitespace-quoted-filename-goes-here>

    and thus it is really quite easy to parse for some line- and word-oriented parser (which should be quite natural for most scripting languages).

    Note

    For people who do parsing: to make it more robust, just ignore any lines between the first and last one ("<sha1>" and "filename" lines) where you do not recognize the tag words (or care about that particular one) at the beginning of the "extended information" lines. That way, if there is ever added information (like the commit encoding or extended commit commentary), a blame viewer will not care.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

blame.blankBoundary
Show blank commit object name for boundary commits in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.coloring
This determines the coloring scheme to be applied to blame output. It can be repeatedLines, highlightRecent, or none which is the default.
blame.date
Specifies the format used to output dates in the section called “git-blame(1)”. If unset the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option at the section called “git-log(1)”.
blame.showEmail
Show the author email instead of author name in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.showRoot
Do not treat root commits as boundaries in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.ignoreRevsFile
Ignore revisions listed in the file, one unabbreviated object name per line, in the section called “git-blame(1)”. Whitespace and comments beginning with # are ignored. This option may be repeated multiple times. Empty file names will reset the list of ignored revisions. This option will be handled before the command line option --ignore-revs-file.
blame.markUnblamableLines
Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we could not attribute to another commit with a * in the output of the section called “git-blame(1)”.
blame.markIgnoredLines
Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we attributed to another commit with a ? in the output of the section called “git-blame(1)”.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-branch(1)

NAME

git-branch - List, create, or delete branches

SYNOPSIS

git branch [--color[=<when>] | --no-color] [--show-current]
           [-v [--abbrev=<n> | --no-abbrev]]
           [--column[=<options>] | --no-column] [--sort=<key>]
           [--merged [<commit>]] [--no-merged [<commit>]]
           [--contains [<commit>]] [--no-contains [<commit>]]
           [--points-at <object>] [--format=<format>]
           [(-r|--remotes) | (-a|--all)]
           [--list] [<pattern>]
git branch [--track[=(direct|inherit)] | --no-track] [-f]
           [--recurse-submodules<branch-name> [<start-point>]
git branch (--set-upstream-to=<upstream>|-u <upstream>) [<branch-name>]
git branch --unset-upstream [<branch-name>]
git branch (-m|-M) [<old-branch><new-branch>
git branch (-c|-C) [<old-branch><new-branch>
git branch (-d|-D) [-r<branch-name>
git branch --edit-description [<branch-name>]

DESCRIPTION

If --list is given, or if there are no non-option arguments, existing branches are listed; the current branch will be highlighted in green and marked with an asterisk. Any branches checked out in linked worktrees will be highlighted in cyan and marked with a plus sign. Option -r causes the remote-tracking branches to be listed, and option -a shows both local and remote branches.

If a <pattern> is given, it is used as a shell wildcard to restrict the output to matching branches. If multiple patterns are given, a branch is shown if it matches any of the patterns.

Note that when providing a <pattern>, you must use --list; otherwise the command may be interpreted as branch creation.

With --contains, shows only the branches that contain the named commit (in other words, the branches whose tip commits are descendants of the named commit), --no-contains inverts it. With --merged, only branches merged into the named commit (i.e. the branches whose tip commits are reachable from the named commit) will be listed. With --no-merged only branches not merged into the named commit will be listed. If the <commit> argument is missing it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the tip of the current branch).

The command's second form creates a new branch head named <branch-name> which points to the current HEAD, or <start-point> if given. As a special case, for <start-point>, you may use <rev-A>...<rev-B> as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-A> and <rev-B> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-A> and <rev-B>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

Note that this will create the new branch, but it will not switch the working tree to it; use git switch <new-branch> to switch to the new branch.

When a local branch is started off a remote-tracking branch, Git sets up the branch (specifically the branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge configuration entries) so that git pull will appropriately merge from the remote-tracking branch. This behavior may be changed via the global branch.autoSetupMerge configuration flag. That setting can be overridden by using the --track and --no-track options, and changed later using git branch --set-upstream-to.

With a -m or -M option, <old-branch> will be renamed to <new-branch>. If <old-branch> had a corresponding reflog, it is renamed to match <new-branch>, and a reflog entry is created to remember the branch renaming. If <new-branch> exists, -M must be used to force the rename to happen.

The -c and -C options have the exact same semantics as -m and -M, except instead of the branch being renamed, it will be copied to a new name, along with its config and reflog.

With a -d or -D option, <branch-name> will be deleted. You may specify more than one branch for deletion. If the branch currently has a reflog then the reflog will also be deleted.

Use -r together with -d to delete remote-tracking branches. Note, that it only makes sense to delete remote-tracking branches if they no longer exist in the remote repository or if git fetch was configured not to fetch them again. See also the prune subcommand of the section called “git-remote(1)” for a way to clean up all obsolete remote-tracking branches.

OPTIONS

-d , --delete
Delete a branch. The branch must be fully merged in its upstream branch, or in HEAD if no upstream was set with --track or --set-upstream-to.
-D
Shortcut for --delete --force.
--create-reflog
Create the branch's reflog. This activates recording of all changes made to the branch ref, enabling use of date based sha1 expressions such as <branch-name>@{yesterday}. Note that in non-bare repositories, reflogs are usually enabled by default by the core.logAllRefUpdates config option. The negated form --no-create-reflog only overrides an earlier --create-reflog, but currently does not negate the setting of core.logAllRefUpdates.
-f , --force

Reset <branch-name> to <start-point>, even if <branch-name> exists already. Without -f, git branch refuses to change an existing branch. In combination with -d (or --delete), allow deleting the branch irrespective of its merged status, or whether it even points to a valid commit. In combination with -m (or --move), allow renaming the branch even if the new branch name already exists, the same applies for -c (or --copy).

Note that git branch -f <branch-name> [<start-point>], even with -f, refuses to change an existing branch <branch-name> that is checked out in another worktree linked to the same repository.

-m , --move
Move/rename a branch, together with its config and reflog.
-M
Shortcut for --move --force.
-c , --copy
Copy a branch, together with its config and reflog.
-C
Shortcut for --copy --force.
--color[=<when>]
Color branches to highlight current, local, and remote-tracking branches. The value must be always (the default), never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off branch colors, even when the configuration file gives the default to color output. Same as --color=never.
-i , --ignore-case
Sorting and filtering branches are case insensitive.
--omit-empty
Do not print a newline after formatted refs where the format expands to the empty string.
--column[=<options>] , --no-column

Display branch listing in columns. See configuration variable column.branch for option syntax. --column and --no-column without options are equivalent to always and never respectively.

This option is only applicable in non-verbose mode.

--sort=<key>
Sort based on <key>. Prefix - to sort in descending order of the value. You may use the --sort=<key> option multiple times, in which case the last key becomes the primary key. The keys supported are the same as those in the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”. Sort order defaults to the value configured for the branch.sort variable if it exists, or to sorting based on the full refname (including refs/... prefix). This lists detached HEAD (if present) first, then local branches and finally remote-tracking branches. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
-r , --remotes
List or delete (if used with -d) the remote-tracking branches. Combine with --list to match the optional pattern(s).
-a , --all
List both remote-tracking branches and local branches. Combine with --list to match optional pattern(s).
-l , --list
List branches. With optional <pattern>..., e.g. git branch --list 'maint-*', list only the branches that match the pattern(s).
--show-current
Print the name of the current branch. In detached HEAD state, nothing is printed.
-v , -vv , --verbose
When in list mode, show sha1 and commit subject line for each head, along with relationship to upstream branch (if any). If given twice, print the path of the linked worktree (if any) and the name of the upstream branch, as well (see also git remote show <remote>). Note that the current worktree's HEAD will not have its path printed (it will always be your current directory).
-q , --quiet
Be more quiet when creating or deleting a branch, suppressing non-error messages.
--abbrev=<n>
In the verbose listing that show the commit object name, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. The default value is 7 and can be overridden by the core.abbrev config option.
--no-abbrev
Display the full sha1s in the output listing rather than abbreviating them.
-t , --track[=(direct|inherit)]

When creating a new branch, set up branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge configuration entries to set "upstream" tracking configuration for the new branch. This configuration will tell git to show the relationship between the two branches in git status and git branch -v. Furthermore, it directs git pull without arguments to pull from the upstream when the new branch is checked out.

The exact upstream branch is chosen depending on the optional argument: -t, --track, or --track=direct means to use the start-point branch itself as the upstream; --track=inherit means to copy the upstream configuration of the start-point branch.

The branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable specifies how git switch, git checkout and git branch should behave when neither --track nor --no-track are specified:

The default option, true, behaves as though --track=direct were given whenever the start-point is a remote-tracking branch. false behaves as if --no-track were given. always behaves as though --track=direct were given. inherit behaves as though --track=inherit were given. simple behaves as though --track=direct were given only when the <start-point> is a remote-tracking branch and the new branch has the same name as the remote branch.

See the section called “git-pull(1)” and the section called “git-config(1)” for additional discussion on how the branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge options are used.

--no-track
Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable is set.
--recurse-submodules

THIS OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL! Cause the current command to recurse into submodules if submodule.propagateBranches is enabled. See submodule.propagateBranches in the section called “git-config(1)”. Currently, only branch creation is supported.

When used in branch creation, a new branch <branch-name> will be created in the superproject and all of the submodules in the superproject's <start-point>. In submodules, the branch will point to the submodule commit in the superproject's <start-point> but the branch's tracking information will be set up based on the submodule's branches and remotes e.g. git branch --recurse-submodules topic origin/main will create the submodule branch "topic" that points to the submodule commit in the superproject's "origin/main", but tracks the submodule's "origin/main".

--set-upstream
As this option had confusing syntax, it is no longer supported. Please use --track or --set-upstream-to instead.
-u <upstream> , --set-upstream-to=<upstream>
Set up <branch-name>'s tracking information so <upstream> is considered <branch-name>'s upstream branch. If no <branch-name> is specified, then it defaults to the current branch.
--unset-upstream
Remove the upstream information for <branch-name>. If no branch is specified it defaults to the current branch.
--edit-description
Open an editor and edit the text to explain what the branch is for, to be used by various other commands (e.g. format-patch, request-pull, and merge (if enabled)). Multi-line explanations may be used.
--contains [<commit>]
Only list branches which contain <commit> (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--no-contains [<commit>]
Only list branches which don't contain <commit> (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--merged [<commit>]
Only list branches whose tips are reachable from <commit> (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--no-merged [<commit>]
Only list branches whose tips are not reachable from <commit> (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--points-at <object>
Only list branches of <object>.
--format <format>
A string that interpolates %(fieldname) from a branch ref being shown and the object it points at. <format> is the same as that of the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”.
<branch-name>
The name of the branch to create or delete. The new branch name must pass all checks defined by the section called “git-check-ref-format(1)”. Some of these checks may restrict the characters allowed in a branch name.
<start-point>
The new branch head will point to this commit. It may be given as a branch name, a commit-id, or a tag. If this option is omitted, the current HEAD will be used instead.
<old-branch>
The name of an existing branch. If this option is omitted, the name of the current branch will be used instead.
<new-branch>
The new name for an existing branch. The same restrictions as for <branch-name> apply.

CONFIGURATION

pager.branch is only respected when listing branches, i.e., when --list is used or implied. The default is to use a pager. See the section called “git-config(1)”.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

branch.autoSetupMerge

Tells git branch, git switch and git checkout to set up new branches so that the section called “git-pull(1)” will appropriately merge from the starting point branch. Note that even if this option is not set, this behavior can be chosen per-branch using the --track and --no-track options. This option defaults to true. The valid settings are:

false
no automatic setup is done
true
automatic setup is done when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch
always
automatic setup is done when the starting point is either a local branch or remote-tracking branch
inherit
if the starting point has a tracking configuration, it is copied to the new branch
simple
automatic setup is done only when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch and the new branch has the same name as the remote branch.
branch.autoSetupRebase

When a new branch is created with git branch, git switch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see branch.<name>.rebase). The valid settings are:

never
rebase is never automatically set to true.
local
rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches.
remote
rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches.
always
rebase will be set to true for all tracking branches.

See branch.autoSetupMerge for details on how to set up a branch to track another branch. This option defaults to never.

branch.sort
This variable controls the sort ordering of branches when displayed by the section called “git-branch(1)”. Without the --sort=<value> option provided, the value of this variable will be used as the default. See the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)” field names for valid values.
branch.<name>.remote
When on branch <name>, it tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from or push to. The remote to push to may be overridden with remote.pushDefault (for all branches). The remote to push to, for the current branch, may be further overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote. If no remote is configured, or if you are not on any branch and there is more than one remote defined in the repository, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing. Additionally, . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository), see branch.<name>.merge's final note below.
branch.<name>.pushRemote
When on branch <name>, it overrides branch.<name>.remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch <name>. When you pull from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another place (e.g. your own publishing repository), you would want to set remote.pushDefault to specify the remote to push to for all branches, and use this option to override it for a specific branch.
branch.<name>.merge
Defines, together with branch.<name>.remote, the upstream branch for the given branch. It tells git fetch/git pull/git rebase which branch to merge and can also affect git push (see push.default). When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default refspec to be marked for merging in FETCH_HEAD. The value is handled like the remote part of a refspec, and must match a ref which is fetched from the remote given by branch.<name>.remote. The merge information is used by git pull (which first calls git fetch) to lookup the default branch for merging. Without this option, git pull defaults to merge the first refspec fetched. Specify multiple values to get an octopus merge. If you wish to setup git pull so that it merges into <name> from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch.<name>.merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch.<name>.remote.
branch.<name>.mergeOptions
Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of the section called “git-merge(1)”, but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported.
branch.<name>.rebase

When true, rebase the branch <name> on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when git pull is run. See pull.rebase for doing this in a non branch-specific manner.

When merges (or just m), pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

When the value is interactive (or just i), the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

branch.<name>.description
Branch description, can be edited with git branch --edit-description. Branch description is automatically added to the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary.

EXAMPLES

Start development from a known tag
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/.../linux-2.6 my2.6
$ cd my2.6
$ git branch my2.6.14 v2.6.14   1
$ git switch my2.6.14

1

This step and the next one could be combined into a single step with "checkout -b my2.6.14 v2.6.14".

Delete an unneeded branch
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/.../git.git my.git
$ cd my.git
$ git branch -d -r origin/todo origin/html origin/man   1
$ git branch -D test                                    2

1

Delete the remote-tracking branches "todo", "html" and "man". The next git fetch or git pull will create them again unless you configure them not to. See the section called “git-fetch(1)”.

2

Delete the "test" branch even if the "master" branch (or whichever branch is currently checked out) does not have all commits from the test branch.

Listing branches from a specific remote
$ git branch -r -l '<remote>/<pattern>'                 1
$ git for-each-ref 'refs/remotes/<remote>/<pattern>'    2

1

Using -a would conflate <remote> with any local branches you happen to have been prefixed with the same <remote> pattern.

2

for-each-ref can take a wide range of options. See the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”

Patterns will normally need quoting.

NOTES

If you are creating a branch that you want to switch to immediately, it is easier to use the git switch command with its -c option to do the same thing with a single command.

The options --contains, --no-contains, --merged and --no-merged serve four related but different purposes:

  • --contains <commit> is used to find all branches which will need special attention if <commit> were to be rebased or amended, since those branches contain the specified <commit>.
  • --no-contains <commit> is the inverse of that, i.e. branches that don't contain the specified <commit>.
  • --merged is used to find all branches which can be safely deleted, since those branches are fully contained by HEAD.
  • --no-merged is used to find branches which are candidates for merging into HEAD, since those branches are not fully contained by HEAD.

When combining multiple --contains and --no-contains filters, only references that contain at least one of the --contains commits and contain none of the --no-contains commits are shown.

When combining multiple --merged and --no-merged filters, only references that are reachable from at least one of the --merged commits and from none of the --no-merged commits are shown.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-bugreport(1)

NAME

git-bugreport - Collect information for user to file a bug report

SYNOPSIS

git bugreport [(-o | --output-directory) <path>]
                [(-s | --suffix) <format> | --no-suffix]
                [--diagnose[=<mode>]]

DESCRIPTION

Collects information about the user's machine, Git client, and repository state, in addition to a form requesting information about the behavior the user observed, and stores it in a single text file which the user can then share, for example to the Git mailing list, in order to report an observed bug.

The following information is requested from the user:

  • Reproduction steps
  • Expected behavior
  • Actual behavior

The following information is captured automatically:

  • git version --build-options
  • uname sysname, release, version, and machine strings
  • Compiler-specific info string
  • A list of enabled hooks
  • $SHELL

Additional information may be gathered into a separate zip archive using the --diagnose option, and can be attached alongside the bugreport document to provide additional context to readers.

This tool is invoked via the typical Git setup process, which means that in some cases, it might not be able to launch - for example, if a relevant config file is unreadable. In this kind of scenario, it may be helpful to manually gather the kind of information listed above when manually asking for help.

OPTIONS

-o <path> , --output-directory <path>
Place the resulting bug report file in <path> instead of the current directory.
-s <format> , --suffix <format> , --no-suffix
Specify an alternate suffix for the bugreport name, to create a file named git-bugreport-<formatted-suffix>. This should take the form of a strftime(3) format string; the current local time will be used. --no-suffix disables the suffix and the file is just named git-bugreport without any disambiguation measure.
--no-diagnose , --diagnose[=<mode>]

Create a zip archive of supplemental information about the user's machine, Git client, and repository state. The archive is written to the same output directory as the bug report and is named git-diagnostics-<formatted-suffix>.

Without mode specified, the diagnostic archive will contain the default set of statistics reported by git diagnose. An optional mode value may be specified to change which information is included in the archive. See the section called “git-diagnose(1)” for the list of valid values for mode and details about their usage.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-bundle(1)

NAME

git-bundle - Move objects and refs by archive

SYNOPSIS

git bundle create [-q | --quiet | --progress]
                    [--version=<version>] <file> <git-rev-list-args>
git bundle verify [-q | --quiet] <file>
git bundle list-heads <file> [<refname>…]
git bundle unbundle [--progress] <file> [<refname>…]

DESCRIPTION

Create, unpack, and manipulate "bundle" files. Bundles are used for the "offline" transfer of Git objects without an active "server" sitting on the other side of the network connection.

They can be used to create both incremental and full backups of a repository (see the "full backup" example in "EXAMPLES"), and to relay the state of the references in one repository to another (see the second example).

Git commands that fetch or otherwise "read" via protocols such as ssh:// and https:// can also operate on bundle files. It is possible the section called “git-clone(1)” a new repository from a bundle, to use the section called “git-fetch(1)” to fetch from one, and to list the references contained within it with the section called “git-ls-remote(1)”. There's no corresponding "write" support, i.e. a git push into a bundle is not supported.

BUNDLE FORMAT

Bundles are .pack files (see the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”) with a header indicating what references are contained within the bundle.

Like the packed archive format itself bundles can either be self-contained, or be created using exclusions. See the "OBJECT PREREQUISITES" section below.

Bundles created using revision exclusions are "thin packs" created using the --thin option to the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”, and unbundled using the --fix-thin option to the section called “git-index-pack(1)”.

There is no option to create a "thick pack" when using revision exclusions, and users should not be concerned about the difference. By using "thin packs", bundles created using exclusions are smaller in size. That they're "thin" under the hood is merely noted here as a curiosity, and as a reference to other documentation.

See the section called “gitformat-bundle(5)” for more details and the discussion of "thin pack" in the section called “gitformat-pack(5)” for further details.

OPTIONS

create [options] <file> <git-rev-list-args>
Used to create a bundle named file. This requires the <git-rev-list-args> arguments to define the bundle contents. options contains the options specific to the git bundle create subcommand. If file is -, the bundle is written to stdout.
verify <file>
Used to check that a bundle file is valid and will apply cleanly to the current repository. This includes checks on the bundle format itself as well as checking that the prerequisite commits exist and are fully linked in the current repository. Then, git bundle prints a list of missing commits, if any. Finally, information about additional capabilities, such as "object filter", is printed. See "Capabilities" in the section called “gitformat-bundle(5)” for more information. The exit code is zero for success, but will be nonzero if the bundle file is invalid. If file is -, the bundle is read from stdin.
list-heads <file>
Lists the references defined in the bundle. If followed by a list of references, only references matching those given are printed out. If file is -, the bundle is read from stdin.
unbundle <file>
Passes the objects in the bundle to git index-pack for storage in the repository, then prints the names of all defined references. If a list of references is given, only references matching those in the list are printed. This command is really plumbing, intended to be called only by git fetch. If file is -, the bundle is read from stdin.
<git-rev-list-args>
A list of arguments, acceptable to git rev-parse and git rev-list (and containing a named ref, see SPECIFYING REFERENCES below), that specifies the specific objects and references to transport. For example, master~10..master causes the current master reference to be packaged along with all objects added since its 10th ancestor commit. There is no explicit limit to the number of references and objects that may be packaged.
[<refname>…]
A list of references used to limit the references reported as available. This is principally of use to git fetch, which expects to receive only those references asked for and not necessarily everything in the pack (in this case, git bundle acts like git fetch-pack).
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--version=<version>
Specify the bundle version. Version 2 is the older format and can only be used with SHA-1 repositories; the newer version 3 contains capabilities that permit extensions. The default is the oldest supported format, based on the hash algorithm in use.
-q , --quiet
This flag makes the command not to report its progress on the standard error stream.

SPECIFYING REFERENCES

Revisions must be accompanied by reference names to be packaged in a bundle. Alternatively --all can be used to package all refs.

More than one reference may be packaged, and more than one set of prerequisite objects can be specified. The objects packaged are those not contained in the union of the prerequisites.

The git bundle create command resolves the reference names for you using the same rules as git rev-parse --abbrev-ref=loose. Each prerequisite can be specified explicitly (e.g. ^master~10), or implicitly (e.g. master~10..master, --since=10.days.ago master).

All of these simple cases are OK (assuming we have a "master" and "next" branch):

$ git bundle create master.bundle master
$ echo master | git bundle create master.bundle --stdin
$ git bundle create master-and-next.bundle master next
$ (echo master; echo next) | git bundle create master-and-next.bundle --stdin

And so are these (and the same but omitted --stdin examples):

$ git bundle create recent-master.bundle master~10..master
$ git bundle create recent-updates.bundle master~10..master next~5..next

A revision name or a range whose right-hand-side cannot be resolved to a reference is not accepted:

$ git bundle create HEAD.bundle $(git rev-parse HEAD)
fatal: Refusing to create empty bundle.
$ git bundle create master-yesterday.bundle master~10..master~5
fatal: Refusing to create empty bundle.

OBJECT PREREQUISITES

When creating bundles it is possible to create a self-contained bundle that can be unbundled in a repository with no common history, as well as providing negative revisions to exclude objects needed in the earlier parts of the history.

Feeding a revision such as new to git bundle create will create a bundle file that contains all the objects reachable from the revision new. That bundle can be unbundled in any repository to obtain a full history that leads to the revision new:

$ git bundle create full.bundle new

A revision range such as old..new will produce a bundle file that will require the revision old (and any objects reachable from it) to exist for the bundle to be "unbundle"-able:

$ git bundle create full.bundle old..new

A self-contained bundle without any prerequisites can be extracted into anywhere, even into an empty repository, or be cloned from (i.e., new, but not old..new).

It is okay to err on the side of caution, causing the bundle file to contain objects already in the destination, as these are ignored when unpacking at the destination.

If you want to provide the same set of refs that a clone directly from the source repository would get, use --branches --tags for the <git-rev-list-args>.

The git bundle verify command can be used to check whether your recipient repository has the required prerequisite commits for a bundle.

EXAMPLES

We'll discuss two cases:

  1. Taking a full backup of a repository
  2. Transferring the history of a repository to another machine when the two machines have no direct connection

First let's consider a full backup of the repository. The following command will take a full backup of the repository in the sense that all refs are included in the bundle:

$ git bundle create backup.bundle --all

But note again that this is only for the refs, i.e. you will only include refs and commits reachable from those refs. You will not include other local state, such as the contents of the index, working tree, the stash, per-repository configuration, hooks, etc.

You can later recover that repository by using for example the section called “git-clone(1)”:

$ git clone backup.bundle <new directory>

For the next example, assume you want to transfer the history from a repository R1 on machine A to another repository R2 on machine B. For whatever reason, direct connection between A and B is not allowed, but we can move data from A to B via some mechanism (CD, email, etc.). We want to update R2 with development made on the branch master in R1.

To bootstrap the process, you can first create a bundle that does not have any prerequisites. You can use a tag to remember up to what commit you last processed, in order to make it easy to later update the other repository with an incremental bundle:

machineA$ cd R1
machineA$ git bundle create file.bundle master
machineA$ git tag -f lastR2bundle master

Then you transfer file.bundle to the target machine B. Because this bundle does not require any existing object to be extracted, you can create a new repository on machine B by cloning from it:

machineB$ git clone -b master /home/me/tmp/file.bundle R2

This will define a remote called "origin" in the resulting repository that lets you fetch and pull from the bundle. The $GIT_DIR/config file in R2 will have an entry like this:

[remote "origin"]
    url = /home/me/tmp/file.bundle
    fetch = refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

To update the resulting mine.git repository, you can fetch or pull after replacing the bundle stored at /home/me/tmp/file.bundle with incremental updates.

After working some more in the original repository, you can create an incremental bundle to update the other repository:

machineA$ cd R1
machineA$ git bundle create file.bundle lastR2bundle..master
machineA$ git tag -f lastR2bundle master

You then transfer the bundle to the other machine to replace /home/me/tmp/file.bundle, and pull from it.

machineB$ cd R2
machineB$ git pull

If you know up to what commit the intended recipient repository should have the necessary objects, you can use that knowledge to specify the prerequisites, giving a cut-off point to limit the revisions and objects that go in the resulting bundle. The previous example used the lastR2bundle tag for this purpose, but you can use any other options that you would give to the the section called “git-log(1)” command. Here are more examples:

You can use a tag that is present in both:

$ git bundle create mybundle v1.0.0..master

You can use a prerequisite based on time:

$ git bundle create mybundle --since=10.days master

You can use the number of commits:

$ git bundle create mybundle -10 master

You can run git-bundle verify to see if you can extract from a bundle that was created with a prerequisite:

$ git bundle verify mybundle

This will list what commits you must have in order to extract from the bundle and will error out if you do not have them.

A bundle from a recipient repository's point of view is just like a regular repository which it fetches or pulls from. You can, for example, map references when fetching:

$ git fetch mybundle master:localRef

You can also see what references it offers:

$ git ls-remote mybundle

DISCUSSION

A naive way to make a full backup of a repository is to use something to the effect of cp -r <repo> <destination>. This is discouraged since the repository could be written to during the copy operation. In turn some files at <destination> could be corrupted.

This is why it is recommended to use Git tooling for making repository backups, either with this command or with e.g. the section called “git-clone(1)”. But keep in mind that these tools will not help you backup state other than refs and commits. In other words they will not help you backup contents of the index, working tree, the stash, per-repository configuration, hooks, etc.

See also the section called “gitfaq(7)”, section "TRANSFERS" for a discussion of the problems associated with file syncing across systems.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cat-file(1)

NAME

git-cat-file - Provide contents or details of repository objects

SYNOPSIS

git cat-file <type> <object>
git cat-file (-e | -p | -t | -s) <object>
git cat-file (--textconv | --filters)
             [<rev>:<path|tree-ish> | --path=<path|tree-ish> <rev>]
git cat-file (--batch | --batch-check | --batch-command) [--batch-all-objects]
             [--buffer] [--follow-symlinks] [--unordered]
             [--textconv | --filters] [-Z]

DESCRIPTION

Output the contents or other properties such as size, type or delta information of one or more objects.

This command can operate in two modes, depending on whether an option from the --batch family is specified.

In non-batch mode, the command provides information on an object named on the command line.

In batch mode, arguments are read from standard input.

OPTIONS

<object>
The name of the object to show. For a more complete list of ways to spell object names, see the "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.
-t
Instead of the content, show the object type identified by <object>.
-s
Instead of the content, show the object size identified by <object>. If used with --use-mailmap option, will show the size of updated object after replacing idents using the mailmap mechanism.
-e
Exit with zero status if <object> exists and is a valid object. If <object> is of an invalid format, exit with non-zero status and emit an error on stderr.
-p
Pretty-print the contents of <object> based on its type.
<type>
Typically this matches the real type of <object> but asking for a type that can trivially be dereferenced from the given <object> is also permitted. An example is to ask for a "tree" with <object> being a commit object that contains it, or to ask for a "blob" with <object> being a tag object that points at it.
--[no-]mailmap , --[no-]use-mailmap
Use mailmap file to map author, committer and tagger names and email addresses to canonical real names and email addresses. See the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
--textconv
Show the content as transformed by a textconv filter. In this case, <object> has to be of the form <tree-ish>:<path>, or :<path> in order to apply the filter to the content recorded in the index at <path>.
--filters
Show the content as converted by the filters configured in the current working tree for the given <path> (i.e. smudge filters, end-of-line conversion, etc). In this case, <object> has to be of the form <tree-ish>:<path>, or :<path>.
--filter=<filter-spec> , --no-filter

Omit objects from the list of printed objects. This can only be used in combination with one of the batched modes. Excluded objects that have been explicitly requested via any of the batch modes that read objects via standard input (--batch, --batch-check) will be reported as "filtered". Excluded objects in --batch-all-objects mode will not be printed at all. The <filter-spec> may be one of the following:

The form --filter=blob:none omits all blobs.

The form --filter=blob:limit=<n>[kmg] omits blobs of size at least n bytes or units. n may be zero. The suffixes k, m, and g can be used to name units in KiB, MiB, or GiB. For example, blob:limit=1k is the same as blob:limit=1024.

The form --filter=object:type=(tag|commit|tree|blob) omits all objects which are not of the requested type.

--path=<path>
For use with --textconv or --filters, to allow specifying an object name and a path separately, e.g. when it is difficult to figure out the revision from which the blob came.
--batch , --batch=<format>

Print object information and contents for each object provided on stdin. May not be combined with any other options or arguments except --textconv, --filters, or --use-mailmap.

  • When used with --textconv or --filters, the input lines must specify the path, separated by whitespace. See the section BATCH OUTPUT below for details.
  • When used with --use-mailmap, for commit and tag objects, the contents part of the output shows the identities replaced using the mailmap mechanism, while the information part of the output shows the size of the object as if it actually recorded the replacement identities.
--batch-check , --batch-check=<format>

Print object information for each object provided on stdin. May not be combined with any other options or arguments except --textconv, --filters or --use-mailmap.

  • When used with --textconv or --filters, the input lines must specify the path, separated by whitespace. See the section BATCH OUTPUT below for details.
  • When used with --use-mailmap, for commit and tag objects, the printed object information shows the size of the object as if the identities recorded in it were replaced by the mailmap mechanism.
--batch-command , --batch-command=<format>

Enter a command mode that reads commands and arguments from stdin. May only be combined with --buffer, --textconv, --use-mailmap or --filters.

  • When used with --textconv or --filters, the input lines must specify the path, separated by whitespace. See the section BATCH OUTPUT below for details.
  • When used with --use-mailmap, for commit and tag objects, the contents command shows the identities replaced using the mailmap mechanism, while the info command shows the size of the object as if it actually recorded the replacement identities.

--batch-command recognizes the following commands:

contents <object>
Print object contents for object reference <object>. This corresponds to the output of --batch.
info <object>
Print object info for object reference <object>. This corresponds to the output of --batch-check.
flush
Used with --buffer to execute all preceding commands that were issued since the beginning or since the last flush was issued. When --buffer is used, no output will come until a flush is issued. When --buffer is not used, commands are flushed each time without issuing flush.
--batch-all-objects
Instead of reading a list of objects on stdin, perform the requested batch operation on all objects in the repository and any alternate object stores (not just reachable objects). Requires --batch or --batch-check be specified. By default, the objects are visited in order sorted by their hashes; see also --unordered below. Objects are presented as-is, without respecting the "replace" mechanism of the section called “git-replace(1)”.
--buffer
Normally batch output is flushed after each object is output, so that a process can interactively read and write from cat-file. With this option, the output uses normal stdio buffering; this is much more efficient when invoking --batch-check or --batch-command on a large number of objects.
--unordered
When --batch-all-objects is in use, visit objects in an order which may be more efficient for accessing the object contents than hash order. The exact details of the order are unspecified, but if you do not require a specific order, this should generally result in faster output, especially with --batch. Note that cat-file will still show each object only once, even if it is stored multiple times in the repository.
--follow-symlinks

With --batch or --batch-check, follow symlinks inside the repository when requesting objects with extended SHA-1 expressions of the form tree-ish:path-in-tree. Instead of providing output about the link itself, provide output about the linked-to object. If a symlink points outside the tree-ish (e.g. a link to /foo or a root-level link to ../foo), the portion of the link which is outside the tree will be printed.

This option does not (currently) work correctly when an object in the index is specified (e.g. :link instead of HEAD:link) rather than one in the tree.

This option cannot (currently) be used unless --batch or --batch-check is used.

For example, consider a git repository containing:

f: a file containing "hello\n"
link: a symlink to f
dir/link: a symlink to ../f
plink: a symlink to ../f
alink: a symlink to /etc/passwd

For a regular file f, echo HEAD:f | git cat-file --batch would print

ce013625030ba8dba906f756967f9e9ca394464a blob 6

And echo HEAD:link | git cat-file --batch --follow-symlinks would print the same thing, as would HEAD:dir/link, as they both point at HEAD:f.

Without --follow-symlinks, these would print data about the symlink itself. In the case of HEAD:link, you would see

4d1ae35ba2c8ec712fa2a379db44ad639ca277bd blob 1

Both plink and alink point outside the tree, so they would respectively print:

symlink 4
../f
symlink 11
/etc/passwd
-Z
Only meaningful with --batch, --batch-check, or --batch-command; input and output is NUL-delimited instead of newline-delimited.
-z
Only meaningful with --batch, --batch-check, or --batch-command; input is NUL-delimited instead of newline-delimited. This option is deprecated in favor of -Z as the output can otherwise be ambiguous.

OUTPUT

If -t is specified, one of the <type>.

If -s is specified, the size of the <object> in bytes.

If -e is specified, no output, unless the <object> is malformed.

If -p is specified, the contents of <object> are pretty-printed.

If <type> is specified, the raw (though uncompressed) contents of the <object> will be returned.

BATCH OUTPUT

If --batch or --batch-check is given, cat-file will read objects from stdin, one per line, and print information about them in the same order as they have been read. By default, the whole line is considered as an object, as if it were fed to the section called “git-rev-parse(1)”.

When --batch-command is given, cat-file will read commands from stdin, one per line, and print information based on the command given. With --batch-command, the info command followed by an object will print information about the object the same way --batch-check would, and the contents command followed by an object prints contents in the same way --batch would.

You can specify the information shown for each object by using a custom <format>. The <format> is copied literally to stdout for each object, with placeholders of the form %(atom) expanded, followed by a newline. The available atoms are:

objectname
The full hex representation of the object name.
objecttype
The type of the object (the same as cat-file -t reports).
objectsize
The size, in bytes, of the object (the same as cat-file -s reports).
objectsize:disk
The size, in bytes, that the object takes up on disk. See the note about on-disk sizes in the CAVEATS section below.
deltabase
If the object is stored as a delta on-disk, this expands to the full hex representation of the delta base object name. Otherwise, expands to the null OID (all zeroes). See CAVEATS below.
rest
If this atom is used in the output string, input lines are split at the first whitespace boundary. All characters before that whitespace are considered to be the object name; characters after that first run of whitespace (i.e., the "rest" of the line) are output in place of the %(rest) atom.

If no format is specified, the default format is %(objectname) %(objecttype) %(objectsize).

If --batch is specified, or if --batch-command is used with the contents command, the object information is followed by the object contents (consisting of %(objectsize) bytes), followed by a newline.

For example, --batch without a custom format would produce:

<oid> SP <type> SP <size> LF
<contents> LF

Whereas --batch-check='%(objectname) %(objecttype)' would produce:

<oid> SP <type> LF

If a name is specified on stdin that cannot be resolved to an object in the repository, then cat-file will ignore any custom format and print:

<object> SP missing LF

If a name is specified on stdin that is filtered out via --filter=, then cat-file will ignore any custom format and print:

<object> SP excluded LF

If a name is specified that might refer to more than one object (an ambiguous short sha), then cat-file will ignore any custom format and print:

<object> SP ambiguous LF

If --follow-symlinks is used, and a symlink in the repository points outside the repository, then cat-file will ignore any custom format and print:

symlink SP <size> LF
<symlink> LF

The symlink will either be absolute (beginning with a /), or relative to the tree root. For instance, if dir/link points to ../../foo, then <symlink> will be ../foo. <size> is the size of the symlink in bytes.

If --follow-symlinks is used, the following error messages will be displayed:

<object> SP missing LF

is printed when the initial symlink requested does not exist.

dangling SP <size> LF
<object> LF

is printed when the initial symlink exists, but something that it (transitive-of) points to does not.

loop SP <size> LF
<object> LF

is printed for symlink loops (or any symlinks that require more than 40 link resolutions to resolve).

notdir SP <size> LF
<object> LF

is printed when, during symlink resolution, a file is used as a directory name.

Alternatively, when -Z is passed, the line feeds in any of the above examples are replaced with NUL terminators. This ensures that output will be parsable if the output itself would contain a linefeed and is thus recommended for scripting purposes.

CAVEATS

Note that the sizes of objects on disk are reported accurately, but care should be taken in drawing conclusions about which refs or objects are responsible for disk usage. The size of a packed non-delta object may be much larger than the size of objects which delta against it, but the choice of which object is the base and which is the delta is arbitrary and is subject to change during a repack.

Note also that multiple copies of an object may be present in the object database; in this case, it is undefined which copy's size or delta base will be reported.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-check-attr(1)

NAME

git-check-attr - Display gitattributes information

SYNOPSIS

git check-attr [--source <tree-ish>] [-a | --all | <attr>…] [--] <pathname>…
git check-attr --stdin [-z] [--source <tree-ish>] [-a | --all | <attr>…]

DESCRIPTION

For every pathname, this command will list if each attribute is unspecified, set, or unset as a gitattribute on that pathname.

OPTIONS

-a, --all
List all attributes that are associated with the specified paths. If this option is used, then unspecified attributes will not be included in the output.
--cached
Consider .gitattributes in the index only, ignoring the working tree.
--stdin
Read pathnames from the standard input, one per line, instead of from the command line.
-z
The output format is modified to be machine-parsable. If --stdin is also given, input paths are separated with a NUL character instead of a linefeed character.
--source=<tree-ish>
Check attributes against the specified tree-ish. It is common to specify the source tree by naming a commit, branch, or tag associated with it.
--
Interpret all preceding arguments as attributes and all following arguments as path names.

If none of --stdin, --all, or -- is used, the first argument will be treated as an attribute and the rest of the arguments as pathnames.

OUTPUT

The output is of the form: <path> COLON SP <attribute> COLON SP <info> LF

unless -z is in effect, in which case NUL is used as delimiter: <path> NUL <attribute> NUL <info> NUL

<path> is the path of a file being queried, <attribute> is an attribute being queried, and <info> can be either:

unspecified
when the attribute is not defined for the path.
unset
when the attribute is defined as false.
set
when the attribute is defined as true.
<value>
when a value has been assigned to the attribute.

Buffering happens as documented under the GIT_FLUSH option in the section called “git(1)”. The caller is responsible for avoiding deadlocks caused by overfilling an input buffer or reading from an empty output buffer.

EXAMPLES

In the examples, the following .gitattributes file is used:

*.java diff=java -crlf myAttr
NoMyAttr.java !myAttr
README caveat=unspecified
  • Listing a single attribute:

    $ git check-attr diff org/example/MyClass.java
    org/example/MyClass.java: diff: java
  • Listing multiple attributes for a file:

    $ git check-attr crlf diff myAttr -- org/example/MyClass.java
    org/example/MyClass.java: crlf: unset
    org/example/MyClass.java: diff: java
    org/example/MyClass.java: myAttr: set
  • Listing all attributes for a file:

    $ git check-attr --all -- org/example/MyClass.java
    org/example/MyClass.java: diff: java
    org/example/MyClass.java: myAttr: set
  • Listing an attribute for multiple files:

    $ git check-attr myAttr -- org/example/MyClass.java org/example/NoMyAttr.java
    org/example/MyClass.java: myAttr: set
    org/example/NoMyAttr.java: myAttr: unspecified
  • Not all values are equally unambiguous:

    $ git check-attr caveat README
    README: caveat: unspecified

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-check-ignore(1)

NAME

git-check-ignore - Debug gitignore / exclude files

SYNOPSIS

git check-ignore [<options>] <pathname>…
git check-ignore [<options>] --stdin

DESCRIPTION

For each pathname given via the command-line or from a file via --stdin, check whether the file is excluded by .gitignore (or other input files to the exclude mechanism) and output the path if it is excluded.

By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not subject to exclude rules; but see --no-index.

OPTIONS

-q, --quiet
Don't output anything, just set exit status. This is only valid with a single pathname.
-v, --verbose

Instead of printing the paths that are excluded, for each path that matches an exclude pattern, print the exclude pattern together with the path. (Matching an exclude pattern usually means the path is excluded, but if the pattern begins with "!" then it is a negated pattern and matching it means the path is NOT excluded.)

For precedence rules within and between exclude sources, see the section called “gitignore(5)”.

--stdin
Read pathnames from the standard input, one per line, instead of from the command-line.
-z
The output format is modified to be machine-parsable (see below). If --stdin is also given, input paths are separated with a NUL character instead of a linefeed character.
-n, --non-matching
Show given paths which don't match any pattern. This only makes sense when --verbose is enabled, otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish between paths which match a pattern and those which don't.
--no-index
Don't look in the index when undertaking the checks. This can be used to debug why a path became tracked by e.g. git add . and was not ignored by the rules as expected by the user or when developing patterns including negation to match a path previously added with git add -f.

OUTPUT

By default, any of the given pathnames which match an ignore pattern will be output, one per line. If no pattern matches a given path, nothing will be output for that path; this means that path will not be ignored.

If --verbose is specified, the output is a series of lines of the form:

<source> <COLON> <linenum> <COLON> <pattern> <HT> <pathname>

<pathname> is the path of a file being queried, <pattern> is the matching pattern, <source> is the pattern's source file, and <linenum> is the line number of the pattern within that source. If the pattern contained a "!" prefix or "/" suffix, it will be preserved in the output. <source> will be an absolute path when referring to the file configured by core.excludesFile, or relative to the repository root when referring to .git/info/exclude or a per-directory exclude file.

If -z is specified, the pathnames in the output are delimited by the null character; if --verbose is also specified then null characters are also used instead of colons and hard tabs:

<source> <NULL> <linenum> <NULL> <pattern> <NULL> <pathname> <NULL>

If -n or --non-matching are specified, non-matching pathnames will also be output, in which case all fields in each output record except for <pathname> will be empty. This can be useful when running non-interactively, so that files can be incrementally streamed to STDIN of a long-running check-ignore process, and for each of these files, STDOUT will indicate whether that file matched a pattern or not. (Without this option, it would be impossible to tell whether the absence of output for a given file meant that it didn't match any pattern, or that the output hadn't been generated yet.)

Buffering happens as documented under the GIT_FLUSH option in the section called “git(1)”. The caller is responsible for avoiding deadlocks caused by overfilling an input buffer or reading from an empty output buffer.

EXIT STATUS

0
One or more of the provided paths is ignored.
1
None of the provided paths are ignored.
128
A fatal error was encountered.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-check-mailmap(1)

NAME

git-check-mailmap - Show canonical names and email addresses of contacts

SYNOPSIS

git check-mailmap [<options>] <contact>…

DESCRIPTION

For each Name <user@host>, <user@host>, or user@host from the command-line or standard input (when using --stdin), look up the person's canonical name and email address (see "Mapping Authors" below). If found, print them; otherwise print the input as-is.

OPTIONS

--stdin
Read contacts, one per line, from the standard input after exhausting contacts provided on the command-line.
--mailmap-file=<file>
In addition to any configured mailmap files, read the specified mailmap file. Entries in this file take precedence over entries in either the default mailmap file or any configured mailmap file.
--mailmap-blob=<blob>
Like --mailmap-file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. If both --mailmap-file and --mailmap-blob are specified, entries in --mailmap-file will take precedence.

OUTPUT

For each contact, a single line is output, terminated by a newline. If the name is provided or known to the mailmap, Name <user@host> is printed; otherwise only <user@host> is printed.

CONFIGURATION

See mailmap.file and mailmap.blob in the section called “git-config(1)” for how to specify a custom .mailmap target file or object.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-check-ref-format(1)

NAME

git-check-ref-format - Ensures that a reference name is well formed

SYNOPSIS

git check-ref-format [--normalize]
       [--[no-]allow-onelevel] [--refspec-pattern]
       <refname>
git check-ref-format --branch <branchname-shorthand>

DESCRIPTION

Checks if a given refname is acceptable, and exits with a non-zero status if it is not.

A reference is used in Git to specify branches and tags. A branch head is stored in the refs/heads hierarchy, while a tag is stored in the refs/tags hierarchy of the ref namespace (typically in $GIT_DIR/refs/heads and $GIT_DIR/refs/tags directories or, as entries in file $GIT_DIR/packed-refs if refs are packed by git gc).

Git imposes the following rules on how references are named:

  1. They can include slash / for hierarchical (directory) grouping, but no slash-separated component can begin with a dot . or end with the sequence .lock.
  2. They must contain at least one /. This enforces the presence of a category like heads/, tags/ etc. but the actual names are not restricted. If the --allow-onelevel option is used, this rule is waived.
  3. They cannot have two consecutive dots .. anywhere.
  4. They cannot have ASCII control characters (i.e. bytes whose values are lower than \040, or \177 DEL), space, tilde ~, caret ^, or colon : anywhere.
  5. They cannot have question-mark ?, asterisk *, or open bracket [ anywhere. See the --refspec-pattern option below for an exception to this rule.
  6. They cannot begin or end with a slash / or contain multiple consecutive slashes (see the --normalize option below for an exception to this rule).
  7. They cannot end with a dot ..
  8. They cannot contain a sequence @{.
  9. They cannot be the single character @.
  10. They cannot contain a \.

These rules make it easy for shell script based tools to parse reference names, pathname expansion by the shell when a reference name is used unquoted (by mistake), and also avoid ambiguities in certain reference name expressions (see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”):

  1. A double-dot .. is often used as in ref1..ref2, and in some contexts this notation means ^ref1 ref2 (i.e. not in ref1 and in ref2).
  2. A tilde ~ and caret ^ are used to introduce the postfix nth parent and peel onion operation.
  3. A colon : is used as in srcref:dstref to mean "use srcref's value and store it in dstref" in fetch and push operations. It may also be used to select a specific object such as with git cat-file: "git cat-file blob v1.3.3:refs.c".
  4. at-open-brace @{ is used as a notation to access a reflog entry.

With the --branch option, the command takes a name and checks if it can be used as a valid branch name (e.g. when creating a new branch). But be cautious when using the previous checkout syntax that may refer to a detached HEAD state. The rule git check-ref-format --branch $name implements may be stricter than what git check-ref-format refs/heads/$name says (e.g. a dash may appear at the beginning of a ref component, but it is explicitly forbidden at the beginning of a branch name). When run with the --branch option in a repository, the input is first expanded for the previous checkout syntax @{-n}. For example, @{-1} is a way to refer the last thing that was checked out using "git switch" or "git checkout" operation. This option should be used by porcelains to accept this syntax anywhere a branch name is expected, so they can act as if you typed the branch name. As an exception note that, the previous checkout operation might result in a commit object name when the N-th last thing checked out was not a branch.

OPTIONS

--[no-]allow-onelevel
Controls whether one-level refnames are accepted (i.e., refnames that do not contain multiple /-separated components). The default is --no-allow-onelevel.
--refspec-pattern
Interpret <refname> as a reference name pattern for a refspec (as used with remote repositories). If this option is enabled, <refname> is allowed to contain a single * in the refspec (e.g., foo/bar*/baz or foo/bar*baz/ but not foo/bar*/baz*).
--normalize
Normalize refname by removing any leading slash (/) characters and collapsing runs of adjacent slashes between name components into a single slash. If the normalized refname is valid then print it to standard output and exit with a status of 0, otherwise exit with a non-zero status. (--print is a deprecated way to spell --normalize.)

EXAMPLES

  • Print the name of the previous thing checked out:

    $ git check-ref-format --branch @{-1}
  • Determine the reference name to use for a new branch:

    $ ref=$(git check-ref-format --normalize "refs/heads/$newbranch")||
    { echo "we do not like '$newbranch' as a branch name." >&2 ; exit 1 ; }

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-checkout-index(1)

NAME

git-checkout-index - Copy files from the index to the working tree

SYNOPSIS

git checkout-index [-u] [-q] [-a] [-f] [-n] [--prefix=<string>]
                   [--stage=<number>|all]
                   [--temp]
                   [--ignore-skip-worktree-bits]
                   [-z] [--stdin]
                   [--] [<file>…]

DESCRIPTION

Copies all listed files from the index to the working directory (not overwriting existing files).

OPTIONS

-u , --index
update stat information for the checked out entries in the index file.
-q , --quiet
be quiet if files exist or are not in the index
-f , --force
forces overwrite of existing files
-a , --all
checks out all files in the index except for those with the skip-worktree bit set (see --ignore-skip-worktree-bits). Cannot be used together with explicit filenames.
-n , --no-create
Don't checkout new files, only refresh files already checked out.
--prefix=<string>
When creating files, prepend <string> (usually a directory including a trailing /)
--stage=<number>|all
Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out the files from the named stage. <number> must be between 1 and 3. Note: --stage=all automatically implies --temp.
--temp
Instead of copying the files to the working directory, write the content to temporary files. The temporary name associations will be written to stdout.
--ignore-skip-worktree-bits
Check out all files, including those with the skip-worktree bit set.
--stdin
Instead of taking a list of paths from the command line, read the list of paths from the standard input. Paths are separated by LF (i.e. one path per line) by default.
-z
Only meaningful with --stdin; paths are separated with NUL character instead of LF.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

The order of the flags used to matter, but not anymore.

Just doing git checkout-index does nothing. You probably meant git checkout-index -a. And if you want to force it, you want git checkout-index -f -a.

Intuitiveness is not the goal here. Repeatability is. The reason for the "no arguments means no work" behavior is that from scripts you are supposed to be able to do:

$ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | xargs -0 git checkout-index -f --

which will force all existing *.h files to be replaced with their cached copies. If an empty command line implied "all", then this would force-refresh everything in the index, which was not the point. But since git checkout-index accepts --stdin it would be faster to use:

$ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | git checkout-index -f -z --stdin

The -- is just a good idea when you know the rest will be filenames; it will prevent problems with a filename of, for example, -a. Using -- is probably a good policy in scripts.

Using --temp or --stage=all

When --temp is used (or implied by --stage=all) git checkout-index will create a temporary file for each index entry being checked out. The index will not be updated with stat information. These options can be useful if the caller needs all stages of all unmerged entries so that the unmerged files can be processed by an external merge tool.

A listing will be written to stdout providing the association of temporary file names to tracked path names. The listing format has two variations:

  1. tempname TAB path RS

    The first format is what gets used when --stage is omitted or is not --stage=all. The field tempname is the temporary file name holding the file content and path is the tracked path name in the index. Only the requested entries are output.

  2. stage1temp SP stage2temp SP stage3tmp TAB path RS

    The second format is what gets used when --stage=all. The three stage temporary fields (stage1temp, stage2temp, stage3temp) list the name of the temporary file if there is a stage entry in the index or . if there is no stage entry. Paths which only have a stage 0 entry will always be omitted from the output.

In both formats RS (the record separator) is newline by default but will be the null byte if -z was passed on the command line. The temporary file names are always safe strings; they will never contain directory separators or whitespace characters. The path field is always relative to the current directory and the temporary file names are always relative to the top level directory.

If the object being copied out to a temporary file is a symbolic link the content of the link will be written to a normal file. It is up to the end-user or the Porcelain to make use of this information.

EXAMPLES

To update and refresh only the files already checked out
$ git checkout-index -n -f -a && git update-index --ignore-missing --refresh
Using git checkout-index to "export an entire tree"

The prefix ability basically makes it trivial to use git checkout-index as an "export as tree" function. Just read the desired tree into the index, and do:

$ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

git checkout-index will "export" the index into the specified directory.

The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally just prefixed with the specified string. Contrast this with the following example.

Export files with a prefix
$ git checkout-index --prefix=.merged- Makefile

This will check out the currently cached copy of Makefile into the file .merged-Makefile.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-checkout(1)

NAME

git-checkout - Switch branches or restore working tree files

SYNOPSIS

git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [<branch>]
git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m--detach [<branch>]
git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [--detach<commit>
git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [[-b|-B|--orphan<new-branch>] [<start-point>]
git checkout [-f<tree-ish> [--<pathspec>
git checkout [-f<tree-ish> --pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]
git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>] [--<pathspec>
git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]
git checkout (-p|--patch) [<tree-ish>] [--] [<pathspec>]

DESCRIPTION

Updates files in the working tree to match the version in the index or the specified tree. If no pathspec was given, git checkout will also update HEAD to set the specified branch as the current branch.

git checkout [<branch>]

To prepare for working on <branch>, switch to it by updating the index and the files in the working tree, and by pointing HEAD at the branch. Local modifications to the files in the working tree are kept, so that they can be committed to the <branch>.

If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name and --no-guess is not specified, treat as equivalent to

$ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

You could omit <branch>, in which case the command degenerates to "check out the current branch", which is a glorified no-op with rather expensive side-effects to show only the tracking information, if it exists, for the current branch.

git checkout (-b|-B) <new-branch> [<start-point>]

Specifying -b causes a new branch to be created as if the section called “git-branch(1)” were called and then checked out. In this case you can use the --track or --no-track options, which will be passed to git branch. As a convenience, --track without -b implies branch creation; see the description of --track below.

If -B is given, <new-branch> is created if it doesn't exist; otherwise, it is reset. This is the transactional equivalent of

$ git branch -f <branch> [<start-point>]
$ git checkout <branch>

that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git checkout" is successful (e.g., when the branch is in use in another worktree, not just the current branch stays the same, but the branch is not reset to the start-point, either).

git checkout --detach [<branch>] , git checkout [--detach] <commit>

Prepare to work on top of <commit>, by detaching HEAD at it (see "DETACHED HEAD" section), and updating the index and the files in the working tree. Local modifications to the files in the working tree are kept, so that the resulting working tree will be the state recorded in the commit plus the local modifications.

When the <commit> argument is a branch name, the --detach option can be used to detach HEAD at the tip of the branch (git checkout <branch> would check out that branch without detaching HEAD).

Omitting <branch> detaches HEAD at the tip of the current branch.

git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>... , git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>] [<tree-ish>] --pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]

Overwrite the contents of the files that match the pathspec. When the <tree-ish> (most often a commit) is not given, overwrite working tree with the contents in the index. When the <tree-ish> is given, overwrite both the index and the working tree with the contents at the <tree-ish>.

The index may contain unmerged entries because of a previous failed merge. By default, if you try to check out such an entry from the index, the checkout operation will fail and nothing will be checked out. Using -f will ignore these unmerged entries. The contents from a specific side of the merge can be checked out of the index by using --ours or --theirs. With -m, changes made to the working tree file can be discarded to re-create the original conflicted merge result.

git checkout (-p|--patch) [<tree-ish>] [--] [<pathspec>...]
This is similar to the previous mode, but lets you use the interactive interface to show the "diff" output and choose which hunks to use in the result. See below for the description of --patch option.

OPTIONS

-q , --quiet
Quiet, suppress feedback messages.
--progress , --no-progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --quiet is specified. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a terminal, regardless of --quiet.
-f , --force

When switching branches, proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD, and even if there are untracked files in the way. This is used to throw away local changes and any untracked files or directories that are in the way.

When checking out paths from the index, do not fail upon unmerged entries; instead, unmerged entries are ignored.

--ours , --theirs

When checking out paths from the index, check out stage #2 (ours) or #3 (theirs) for unmerged paths.

Note that during git rebase and git pull --rebase, ours and theirs may appear swapped; --ours gives the version from the branch the changes are rebased onto, while --theirs gives the version from the branch that holds your work that is being rebased.

This is because rebase is used in a workflow that treats the history at the remote as the shared canonical one, and treats the work done on the branch you are rebasing as the third-party work to be integrated, and you are temporarily assuming the role of the keeper of the canonical history during the rebase. As the keeper of the canonical history, you need to view the history from the remote as ours (i.e. "our shared canonical history"), while what you did on your side branch as theirs (i.e. "one contributor's work on top of it").

-b <new-branch>
Create a new branch named <new-branch>, start it at <start-point>, and check the resulting branch out; see the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.
-B <new-branch>
Creates the branch <new-branch>, start it at <start-point>; if it already exists, then reset it to <start-point>. And then check the resulting branch out. This is equivalent to running git branch with -f followed by git checkout of that branch; see the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.
-t , --track[=(direct|inherit)]

When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. See --track in the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.

If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and then stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given name has no slash, or the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted. You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.

--no-track
Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable is true.
--guess , --no-guess

If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to

$ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is named by the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable, we'll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if the <branch> isn't unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g. checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout remote branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the origin remote. See also checkout.defaultRemote in the section called “git-config(1)”.

--guess is the default behavior. Use --no-guess to disable it.

The default behavior can be set via the checkout.guess configuration variable.

-l
Create the new branch's reflog; see the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.
-d , --detach
Rather than checking out a branch to work on it, check out a commit for inspection and discardable experiments. This is the default behavior of git checkout <commit> when <commit> is not a branch name. See the "DETACHED HEAD" section below for details.
--orphan <new-branch>

Create a new unborn branch, named <new-branch>, started from <start-point> and switch to it. The first commit made on this new branch will have no parents and it will be the root of a new history totally disconnected from all the other branches and commits.

The index and the working tree are adjusted as if you had previously run git checkout <start-point>. This allows you to start a new history that records a set of paths similar to <start-point> by easily running git commit -a to make the root commit.

This can be useful when you want to publish the tree from a commit without exposing its full history. You might want to do this to publish an open source branch of a project whose current tree is "clean", but whose full history contains proprietary or otherwise encumbered bits of code.

If you want to start a disconnected history that records a set of paths that is totally different from the one of <start-point>, then you should clear the index and the working tree right after creating the orphan branch by running git rm -rf . from the top level of the working tree. Afterwards you will be ready to prepare your new files, repopulating the working tree, by copying them from elsewhere, extracting a tarball, etc.

--ignore-skip-worktree-bits
In sparse checkout mode, git checkout -- <path>... would update only entries matched by <paths> and sparse patterns in $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout. This option ignores the sparse patterns and adds back any files in <path>....
-m , --merge

When switching branches, if you have local modifications to one or more files that are different between the current branch and the branch to which you are switching, the command refuses to switch branches in order to preserve your modifications in context. However, with this option, a three-way merge between the current branch, your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and you will be on the new branch.

When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you need to resolve the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should result in deletion of the path).

When checking out paths from the index, this option lets you recreate the conflicted merge in the specified paths. This option cannot be used when checking out paths from a tree-ish.

When switching branches with --merge, staged changes may be lost.

--conflict=<style>
The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the merge.conflictStyle configuration variable. Possible values are merge (default), diff3, and zdiff3.
-p , --patch

Interactively select hunks in the difference between the <tree-ish> (or the index, if unspecified) and the working tree. The chosen hunks are then applied in reverse to the working tree (and if a <tree-ish> was specified, the index).

This means that you can use git checkout -p to selectively discard edits from your current working tree. See the "Interactive Mode" section of the section called “git-add(1)” to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

Note that this option uses the no overlay mode by default (see also --overlay), and currently doesn't support overlay mode.

--ignore-other-worktrees
git checkout refuses when the wanted branch is already checked out or otherwise in use by another worktree. This option makes it check the branch out anyway. In other words, the branch can be in use by more than one worktree.
--overwrite-ignore , --no-overwrite-ignore
Silently overwrite ignored files when switching branches. This is the default behavior. Use --no-overwrite-ignore to abort the operation when the new branch contains ignored files.
--recurse-submodules , --no-recurse-submodules
Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all active submodules according to the commit recorded in the superproject. If local modifications in a submodule would be overwritten the checkout will fail unless -f is used. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used, submodules working trees will not be updated. Just like the section called “git-submodule(1)”, this will detach HEAD of the submodule.
--overlay , --no-overlay
In the default overlay mode, git checkout never removes files from the index or the working tree. When specifying --no-overlay, files that appear in the index and working tree, but not in <tree-ish> are removed, to make them match <tree-ish> exactly.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).
<branch>

Branch to checkout; if it refers to a branch (i.e., a name that, when prepended with "refs/heads/", is a valid ref), then that branch is checked out. Otherwise, if it refers to a valid commit, your HEAD becomes "detached" and you are no longer on any branch (see below for details).

You can use the @{-N} syntax to refer to the N-th last branch/commit checked out using "git checkout" operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to @{-1}.

As a special case, you may use <rev-a>...<rev-b> as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-a> and <rev-b> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-a> and <rev-b>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

<new-branch>
Name for the new branch.
<start-point>

The name of a commit at which to start the new branch; see the section called “git-branch(1)” for details. Defaults to HEAD.

As a special case, you may use <rev-a>...<rev-b> as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-a> and <rev-b> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-a> and <rev-b>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

<tree-ish>

Tree to checkout from (when paths are given). If not specified, the index will be used.

As a special case, you may use <rev-a>...<rev-b> as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-a> and <rev-b> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-a> and <rev-b>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<pathspec>...

Limits the paths affected by the operation.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

DETACHED HEAD

HEAD normally refers to a named branch (e.g. master). Meanwhile, each branch refers to a specific commit. Let's look at a repo with three commits, one of them tagged, and with branch master checked out:

           HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
            |
            v
a---b---c  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'c')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

When a commit is created in this state, the branch is updated to refer to the new commit. Specifically, git commit creates a new commit d, whose parent is commit c, and then updates branch master to refer to new commit d. HEAD still refers to branch master and so indirectly now refers to commit d:

$ edit; git add; git commit

               HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
                |
                v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

It is sometimes useful to be able to checkout a commit that is not at the tip of any named branch, or even to create a new commit that is not referenced by a named branch. Let's look at what happens when we checkout commit b (here we show two ways this may be done):

$ git checkout v2.0  # or
$ git checkout master^^

   HEAD (refers to commit 'b')
    |
    v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

Notice that regardless of which checkout command we use, HEAD now refers directly to commit b. This is known as being in detached HEAD state. It means simply that HEAD refers to a specific commit, as opposed to referring to a named branch. Let's see what happens when we create a commit:

$ edit; git add; git commit

     HEAD (refers to commit 'e')
      |
      v
      e
     /
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

There is now a new commit e, but it is referenced only by HEAD. We can of course add yet another commit in this state:

$ edit; git add; git commit

         HEAD (refers to commit 'f')
          |
          v
      e---f
     /
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

In fact, we can perform all the normal Git operations. But, let's look at what happens when we then checkout master:

$ git checkout master

               HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
      e---f     |
     /          v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
    ^
    |
  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

It is important to realize that at this point nothing refers to commit f. Eventually commit f (and by extension commit e) will be deleted by the routine Git garbage collection process, unless we create a reference before that happens. If we have not yet moved away from commit f, any of these will create a reference to it:

$ git checkout -b foo  # or "git switch -c foo"  1
$ git branch foo                                 2
$ git tag foo                                    3

1

creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, and then updates HEAD to refer to branch foo. In other words, we'll no longer be in detached HEAD state after this command.

2

similarly creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, but leaves HEAD detached.

3

creates a new tag foo, which refers to commit f, leaving HEAD detached.

If we have moved away from commit f, then we must first recover its object name (typically by using git reflog), and then we can create a reference to it. For example, to see the last two commits to which HEAD referred, we can use either of these commands:

$ git reflog -2 HEAD # or
$ git log -g -2 HEAD

ARGUMENT DISAMBIGUATION

When there is only one argument given and it is not -- (e.g. git checkout abc), and when the argument is both a valid <tree-ish> (e.g. a branch abc exists) and a valid <pathspec> (e.g. a file or a directory whose name is "abc" exists), Git would usually ask you to disambiguate. Because checking out a branch is so common an operation, however, git checkout abc takes "abc" as a <tree-ish> in such a situation. Use git checkout -- <pathspec> if you want to checkout these paths out of the index.

EXAMPLES

1. Paths

The following sequence checks out the master branch, reverts the Makefile to two revisions back, deletes hello.c by mistake, and gets it back from the index.

$ git checkout master             1
$ git checkout master~2 Makefile  2
$ rm -f hello.c
$ git checkout hello.c            3

1

switch branch

2

take a file out of another commit

3

restore hello.c from the index

If you want to check out all C source files out of the index, you can say

$ git checkout -- '*.c'

Note the quotes around *.c. The file hello.c will also be checked out, even though it is no longer in the working tree, because the file globbing is used to match entries in the index (not in the working tree by the shell).

If you have an unfortunate branch that is named hello.c, this step would be confused as an instruction to switch to that branch. You should instead write:

$ git checkout -- hello.c

2. Merge

After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch would be done using:

$ git checkout mytopic

However, your "wrong" branch and correct mytopic branch may differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case the above checkout would fail like this:

$ git checkout mytopic
error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.

You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a three-way merge:

$ git checkout -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz

After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not registered in your index file, so git diff would show you what changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

3. Merge conflict

When a merge conflict happens during switching branches with the -m option, you would see something like this:

$ git checkout -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz
ERROR: Merge conflict in frotz
fatal: merge program failed

At this point, git diff shows the changes cleanly merged as in the previous example, as well as the changes in the conflicted files. Edit and resolve the conflict and mark it resolved with git add as usual:

$ edit frotz
$ git add frotz

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

checkout.defaultRemote

When you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something> and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/<something>. This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it comes to disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this to origin.

Currently this is used by the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)” when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by the section called “git-worktree(1)” when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like commands or functionality in the future.

checkout.guess
Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. See the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)”.
checkout.workers

The number of parallel workers to use when updating the working tree. The default is one, i.e. sequential execution. If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as the number of logical cores available. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

Note

Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also influence how well the parallel version performs.

checkout.thresholdForParallelism
When running parallel checkout with a small number of files, the cost of subprocess spawning and inter-process communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This setting allows you to define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is 100.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cherry-pick(1)

NAME

git-cherry-pick - Apply the changes introduced by some existing commits

SYNOPSIS

git cherry-pick [--edit] [-n] [-m <parent-number>] [-s] [-x] [--ff]
                  [-S[<keyid>]] <commit>…
git cherry-pick (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit)

DESCRIPTION

Given one or more existing commits, apply the change each one introduces, recording a new commit for each. This requires your working tree to be clean (no modifications from the HEAD commit).

When it is not obvious how to apply a change, the following happens:

  1. The current branch and HEAD pointer stay at the last commit successfully made.
  2. The CHERRY_PICK_HEAD ref is set to point at the commit that introduced the change that is difficult to apply.
  3. Paths in which the change applied cleanly are updated both in the index file and in your working tree.
  4. For conflicting paths, the index file records up to three versions, as described in the "TRUE MERGE" section of the section called “git-merge(1)”. The working tree files will include a description of the conflict bracketed by the usual conflict markers <<<<<<< and >>>>>>>.
  5. No other modifications are made.

See the section called “git-merge(1)” for some hints on resolving such conflicts.

OPTIONS

<commit>…
Commits to cherry-pick. For a more complete list of ways to spell commits, see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”. Sets of commits can be passed but no traversal is done by default, as if the --no-walk option was specified, see the section called “git-rev-list(1)”. Note that specifying a range will feed all <commit>… arguments to a single revision walk (see a later example that uses maint master..next).
-e , --edit
With this option, git cherry-pick will let you edit the commit message prior to committing.
--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines how the commit message will be cleaned up before being passed on to the commit machinery. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for more details. In particular, if the <mode> is given a value of scissors, scissors will be appended to MERGE_MSG before being passed on in the case of a conflict.
-x
When recording the commit, append a line that says "(cherry picked from commit …)" to the original commit message in order to indicate which commit this change was cherry-picked from. This is done only for cherry picks without conflicts. Do not use this option if you are cherry-picking from your private branch because the information is useless to the recipient. If on the other hand you are cherry-picking between two publicly visible branches (e.g. backporting a fix to a maintenance branch for an older release from a development branch), adding this information can be useful.
-r
It used to be that the command defaulted to do -x described above, and -r was to disable it. Now the default is not to do -x so this option is a no-op.
-m <parent-number> , --mainline <parent-number>
Usually you cannot cherry-pick a merge because you do not know which side of the merge should be considered the mainline. This option specifies the parent number (starting from 1) of the mainline and allows cherry-pick to replay the change relative to the specified parent.
-n , --no-commit

Usually the command automatically creates a sequence of commits. This flag applies the changes necessary to cherry-pick each named commit to your working tree and the index, without making any commit. In addition, when this option is used, your index does not have to match the HEAD commit. The cherry-pick is done against the beginning state of your index.

This is useful when cherry-picking more than one commits' effect to your index in a row.

-s , --signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer at the end of the commit message. See the signoff option in the section called “git-commit(1)” for more information.
-S[<keyid>] , --gpg-sign[=<keyid>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
--ff
If the current HEAD is the same as the parent of the cherry-pick'ed commit, then a fast forward to this commit will be performed.
--allow-empty
By default, cherry-picking an empty commit will fail, indicating that an explicit invocation of git commit --allow-empty is required. This option overrides that behavior, allowing empty commits to be preserved automatically in a cherry-pick. Note that when "--ff" is in effect, empty commits that meet the "fast-forward" requirement will be kept even without this option. Note also, that use of this option only keeps commits that were initially empty (i.e. the commit recorded the same tree as its parent). Commits which are made empty due to a previous commit will cause the cherry-pick to fail. To force the inclusion of those commits, use --empty=keep.
--allow-empty-message
By default, cherry-picking a commit with an empty message will fail. This option overrides that behavior, allowing commits with empty messages to be cherry picked.
--empty=(drop|keep|stop)

How to handle commits being cherry-picked that are redundant with changes already in the current history.

drop
The commit will be dropped.
keep
The commit will be kept. Implies --allow-empty.
stop
The cherry-pick will stop when the commit is applied, allowing you to examine the commit. This is the default behavior.

Note that --empty=drop and --empty=stop only specify how to handle a commit that was not initially empty, but rather became empty due to a previous commit. Commits that were initially empty will still cause the cherry-pick to fail unless one of --empty=keep or --allow-empty are specified.

--keep-redundant-commits
Deprecated synonym for --empty=keep.
--strategy=<strategy>
Use the given merge strategy. Should only be used once. See the MERGE STRATEGIES section in the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
-X<option> , --strategy-option=<option>
Pass the merge strategy-specific option through to the merge strategy. See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
--rerere-autoupdate , --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to also update the index with the result of resolution. --no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what rerere did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the result to the index with a separate git add.

SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS

--continue
Continue the operation in progress using the information in .git/sequencer. Can be used to continue after resolving conflicts in a failed cherry-pick or revert.
--skip
Skip the current commit and continue with the rest of the sequence.
--quit
Forget about the current operation in progress. Can be used to clear the sequencer state after a failed cherry-pick or revert.
--abort
Cancel the operation and return to the pre-sequence state.

EXAMPLES

git cherry-pick master
Apply the change introduced by the commit at the tip of the master branch and create a new commit with this change.
git cherry-pick ..master , git cherry-pick ^HEAD master
Apply the changes introduced by all commits that are ancestors of master but not of HEAD to produce new commits.
git cherry-pick maint next ^master , git cherry-pick maint master..next
Apply the changes introduced by all commits that are ancestors of maint or next, but not master or any of its ancestors. Note that the latter does not mean maint and everything between master and next; specifically, maint will not be used if it is included in master.
git cherry-pick master~4 master~2
Apply the changes introduced by the fifth and third last commits pointed to by master and create 2 new commits with these changes.
git cherry-pick -n master~1 next
Apply to the working tree and the index the changes introduced by the second last commit pointed to by master and by the last commit pointed to by next, but do not create any commit with these changes.
git cherry-pick --ff ..next
If history is linear and HEAD is an ancestor of next, update the working tree and advance the HEAD pointer to match next. Otherwise, apply the changes introduced by those commits that are in next but not HEAD to the current branch, creating a new commit for each new change.
git rev-list --reverse master -- README | git cherry-pick -n --stdin
Apply the changes introduced by all commits on the master branch that touched README to the working tree and index, so the result can be inspected and made into a single new commit if suitable.

The following sequence attempts to backport a patch, bails out because the code the patch applies to has changed too much, and then tries again, this time exercising more care about matching up context lines.

$ git cherry-pick topic^             1
$ git diff                           2
$ git cherry-pick --abort            3
$ git cherry-pick -Xpatience topic^  4

1

apply the change that would be shown by git show topic^. In this example, the patch does not apply cleanly, so information about the conflict is written to the index and working tree and no new commit results.

2

summarize changes to be reconciled

3

cancel the cherry-pick. In other words, return to the pre-cherry-pick state, preserving any local modifications you had in the working tree.

4

try to apply the change introduced by topic^ again, spending extra time to avoid mistakes based on incorrectly matching context lines.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cherry(1)

NAME

git-cherry - Find commits yet to be applied to upstream

SYNOPSIS

git cherry [-v] [<upstream> [<head> [<limit>]]]

DESCRIPTION

Determine whether there are commits in <head>..<upstream> that are equivalent to those in the range <limit>..<head>.

The equivalence test is based on the diff, after removing whitespace and line numbers. git-cherry therefore detects when commits have been "copied" by means of the section called “git-cherry-pick(1)”, the section called “git-am(1)” or the section called “git-rebase(1)”.

Outputs the SHA1 of every commit in <limit>..<head>, prefixed with - for commits that have an equivalent in <upstream>, and + for commits that do not.

OPTIONS

-v
Show the commit subjects next to the SHA1s.
<upstream>
Upstream branch to search for equivalent commits. Defaults to the upstream branch of HEAD.
<head>
Working branch; defaults to HEAD.
<limit>
Do not report commits up to (and including) limit.

EXAMPLES

Patch workflows

git-cherry is frequently used in patch-based workflows (see the section called “gitworkflows(7)”) to determine if a series of patches has been applied by the upstream maintainer. In such a workflow you might create and send a topic branch like this:

$ git checkout -b topic origin/master
# work and create some commits
$ git format-patch origin/master
$ git send-email ... 00*

Later, you can see whether your changes have been applied by saying (still on topic):

$ git fetch  # update your notion of origin/master
$ git cherry -v

Concrete example

In a situation where topic consisted of three commits, and the maintainer applied two of them, the situation might look like:

$ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --boundary origin/master...topic
* 7654321 (origin/master) upstream tip commit
[... snip some other commits ...]
* cccc111 cherry-pick of C
* aaaa111 cherry-pick of A
[... snip a lot more that has happened ...]
| * cccc000 (topic) commit C
| * bbbb000 commit B
| * aaaa000 commit A
|/
o 1234567 branch point

In such cases, git-cherry shows a concise summary of what has yet to be applied:

$ git cherry origin/master topic
- cccc000... commit C
+ bbbb000... commit B
- aaaa000... commit A

Here, we see that the commits A and C (marked with -) can be dropped from your topic branch when you rebase it on top of origin/master, while the commit B (marked with +) still needs to be kept so that it will be sent to be applied to origin/master.

Using a limit

The optional <limit> is useful in cases where your topic is based on other work that is not in upstream. Expanding on the previous example, this might look like:

$ git log --graph --oneline --decorate --boundary origin/master...topic
* 7654321 (origin/master) upstream tip commit
[... snip some other commits ...]
* cccc111 cherry-pick of C
* aaaa111 cherry-pick of A
[... snip a lot more that has happened ...]
| * cccc000 (topic) commit C
| * bbbb000 commit B
| * aaaa000 commit A
| * 0000fff (base) unpublished stuff F
[... snip ...]
| * 0000aaa unpublished stuff A
|/
o 1234567 merge-base between upstream and topic

By specifying base as the limit, you can avoid listing commits between base and topic:

$ git cherry origin/master topic base
- cccc000... commit C
+ bbbb000... commit B
- aaaa000... commit A

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-citool(1)

NAME

git-citool - Graphical alternative to git-commit

SYNOPSIS

git citool

DESCRIPTION

A Tcl/Tk based graphical interface to review modified files, stage them into the index, enter a commit message and record the new commit onto the current branch. This interface is an alternative to the less interactive git commit program.

git citool is actually a standard alias for git gui citool. See the section called “git-gui(1)” for more details.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-clean(1)

NAME

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

SYNOPSIS

git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] [<pathspec>…]

DESCRIPTION

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional <pathspec>... arguments are given, only those paths that match the pathspec are affected.

OPTIONS

-d
Normally, when no <pathspec> is specified, git clean will not recurse into untracked directories to avoid removing too much. Specify -d to have it recurse into such directories as well. If a <pathspec> is specified, -d is irrelevant; all untracked files matching the specified paths (with exceptions for nested git directories mentioned under --force) will be removed.
-f , --force
If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to delete files or directories unless given -f. Git will refuse to modify untracked nested git repositories (directories with a .git subdirectory) unless a second -f is given.
-i , --interactive
Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See Interactive mode for details. Configuration variable clean.requireForce is ignored, as this mode gives its own safety protection by going interactive.
-n , --dry-run
Don't actually remove anything, just show what would be done. Configuration variable clean.requireForce is ignored, as nothing will be deleted anyway.
-q , --quiet
Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are successfully removed.
-e <pattern> , --exclude=<pattern>
Use the given exclude pattern in addition to the standard ignore rules (see the section called “gitignore(5)”).
-x
Don't use the standard ignore rules (see the section called “gitignore(5)”), but still use the ignore rules given with -e options from the command line. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git restore or git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.
-X
Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

Interactive mode

When the command enters the interactive mode, it shows the files and directories to be cleaned, and goes into its interactive command loop.

The command loop shows the list of subcommands available, and gives a prompt "What now> ". In general, when the prompt ends with a single >, you can pick only one of the choices given and type return, like this:

    *** Commands ***
        1: clean                2: filter by pattern    3: select by numbers
        4: ask each             5: quit                 6: help
    What now> 1

You also could say c or clean above as long as the choice is unique.

The main command loop has 6 subcommands.

clean
Start cleaning files and directories, and then quit.
filter by pattern
This shows the files and directories to be deleted and issues an "Input ignore patterns>>" prompt. You can input space-separated patterns to exclude files and directories from deletion. E.g. "*.c *.h" will exclude files ending with ".c" and ".h" from deletion. When you are satisfied with the filtered result, press ENTER (empty) back to the main menu.
select by numbers
This shows the files and directories to be deleted and issues an "Select items to delete>>" prompt. When the prompt ends with double >> like this, you can make more than one selection, concatenated with whitespace or comma. Also you can say ranges. E.g. "2-5 7,9" to choose 2,3,4,5,7,9 from the list. If the second number in a range is omitted, all remaining items are selected. E.g. "7-" to choose 7,8,9 from the list. You can say * to choose everything. Also when you are satisfied with the filtered result, press ENTER (empty) back to the main menu.
ask each
This will start to clean, and you must confirm one by one in order to delete items. Please note that this action is not as efficient as the above two actions.
quit
This lets you quit without doing any cleaning.
help
Show brief usage of interactive git-clean.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

clean.requireForce
A boolean to make git-clean refuse to delete files unless -f is given. Defaults to true.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-clone(1)

NAME

git-clone - Clone a repository into a new directory

SYNOPSIS

git clone [--template=<template-directory>]
          [-l] [-s] [--no-hardlinks] [-q] [-n] [--bare] [--mirror]
          [-o <name>] [-b <name>] [-u <upload-pack>] [--reference <repository>]
          [--dissociate] [--separate-git-dir <git-dir>]
          [--depth <depth>] [--[no-]single-branch] [--[no-]tags]
          [--recurse-submodules[=<pathspec>]] [--[no-]shallow-submodules]
          [--[no-]remote-submodules] [--jobs <n>] [--sparse] [--[no-]reject-shallow]
          [--filter=<filter-spec>] [--also-filter-submodules]] [--<repository>
          [<directory>]

DESCRIPTION

Clones a repository into a newly created directory, creates remote-tracking branches for each branch in the cloned repository (visible using git branch --remotes), and creates and checks out an initial branch that is forked from the cloned repository's currently active branch.

After the clone, a plain git fetch without arguments will update all the remote-tracking branches, and a git pull without arguments will in addition merge the remote master branch into the current master branch, if any (this is untrue when --single-branch is given; see below).

This default configuration is achieved by creating references to the remote branch heads under refs/remotes/origin and by initializing remote.origin.url and remote.origin.fetch configuration variables.

OPTIONS

-l , --local

When the repository to clone from is on a local machine, this flag bypasses the normal "Git aware" transport mechanism and clones the repository by making a copy of HEAD and everything under objects and refs directories. The files under .git/objects/ directory are hardlinked to save space when possible.

If the repository is specified as a local path (e.g., /path/to/repo), this is the default, and --local is essentially a no-op. If the repository is specified as a URL, then this flag is ignored (and we never use the local optimizations). Specifying --no-local will override the default when /path/to/repo is given, using the regular Git transport instead.

If the repository's $GIT_DIR/objects has symbolic links or is a symbolic link, the clone will fail. This is a security measure to prevent the unintentional copying of files by dereferencing the symbolic links.

This option does not work with repositories owned by other users for security reasons, and --no-local must be specified for the clone to succeed.

NOTE: this operation can race with concurrent modification to the source repository, similar to running cp -r <src> <dst> while modifying <src>.

--no-hardlinks
Force the cloning process from a repository on a local filesystem to copy the files under the .git/objects directory instead of using hardlinks. This may be desirable if you are trying to make a back-up of your repository.
-s , --shared

When the repository to clone is on the local machine, instead of using hard links, automatically setup .git/objects/info/alternates to share the objects with the source repository. The resulting repository starts out without any object of its own.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand what it does. If you clone your repository using this option and then delete branches (or use any other Git command that makes any existing commit unreferenced) in the source repository, some objects may become unreferenced (or dangling). These objects may be removed by normal Git operations (such as git commit) which automatically call git maintenance run --auto. (See the section called “git-maintenance(1)”.) If these objects are removed and were referenced by the cloned repository, then the cloned repository will become corrupt.

Note that running git repack without the --local option in a repository cloned with --shared will copy objects from the source repository into a pack in the cloned repository, removing the disk space savings of clone --shared. It is safe, however, to run git gc, which uses the --local option by default.

If you want to break the dependency of a repository cloned with --shared on its source repository, you can simply run git repack -a to copy all objects from the source repository into a pack in the cloned repository.

--reference[-if-able] <repository>

If the reference <repository> is on the local machine, automatically setup .git/objects/info/alternates to obtain objects from the reference <repository>. Using an already existing repository as an alternate will require fewer objects to be copied from the repository being cloned, reducing network and local storage costs. When using the --reference-if-able, a non existing directory is skipped with a warning instead of aborting the clone.

NOTE: see the NOTE for the --shared option, and also the --dissociate option.

--dissociate
Borrow the objects from reference repositories specified with the --reference options only to reduce network transfer, and stop borrowing from them after a clone is made by making necessary local copies of borrowed objects. This option can also be used when cloning locally from a repository that already borrows objects from another repository--the new repository will borrow objects from the same repository, and this option can be used to stop the borrowing.
-q , --quiet
Operate quietly. Progress is not reported to the standard error stream.
-v , --verbose
Run verbosely. Does not affect the reporting of progress status to the standard error stream.
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --quiet is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--server-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server when communicating using protocol version 2. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF character. The server's handling of server options, including unknown ones, is server-specific. When multiple --server-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the other side in the order listed on the command line. When no --server-option=<option> is given from the command line, the values of configuration variable remote.<name>.serverOption are used instead.
-n , --no-checkout
No checkout of HEAD is performed after the clone is complete.
--[no-]reject-shallow
Fail if the source repository is a shallow repository. The clone.rejectShallow configuration variable can be used to specify the default.
--bare
Make a bare Git repository. That is, instead of creating <directory> and placing the administrative files in <directory>/.git, make the <directory> itself the $GIT_DIR. This obviously implies the --no-checkout because there is nowhere to check out the working tree. Also the branch heads at the remote are copied directly to corresponding local branch heads, without mapping them to refs/remotes/origin/. When this option is used, neither remote-tracking branches nor the related configuration variables are created.
--sparse
Employ a sparse-checkout, with only files in the toplevel directory initially being present. The the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” command can be used to grow the working directory as needed.
--filter=<filter-spec>
Use the partial clone feature and request that the server sends a subset of reachable objects according to a given object filter. When using --filter, the supplied <filter-spec> is used for the partial clone filter. For example, --filter=blob:none will filter out all blobs (file contents) until needed by Git. Also, --filter=blob:limit=<size> will filter out all blobs of size at least <size>. For more details on filter specifications, see the --filter option in the section called “git-rev-list(1)”.
--also-filter-submodules
Also apply the partial clone filter to any submodules in the repository. Requires --filter and --recurse-submodules. This can be turned on by default by setting the clone.filterSubmodules config option.
--mirror
Set up a mirror of the source repository. This implies --bare. Compared to --bare, --mirror not only maps local branches of the source to local branches of the target, it maps all refs (including remote-tracking branches, notes etc.) and sets up a refspec configuration such that all these refs are overwritten by a git remote update in the target repository.
-o <name> , --origin <name>
Instead of using the remote name origin to keep track of the upstream repository, use <name>. Overrides clone.defaultRemoteName from the config.
-b <name> , --branch <name>
Instead of pointing the newly created HEAD to the branch pointed to by the cloned repository's HEAD, point to <name> branch instead. In a non-bare repository, this is the branch that will be checked out. --branch can also take tags and detaches the HEAD at that commit in the resulting repository.
--revision=<rev>
Create a new repository, and fetch the history leading to the given revision <rev> (and nothing else), without making any remote-tracking branch, and without making any local branch, and detach HEAD to <rev>. The argument can be a ref name (e.g. refs/heads/main or refs/tags/v1.0) that peels down to a commit, or a hexadecimal object name. This option is incompatible with --branch and --mirror.
-u <upload-pack> , --upload-pack <upload-pack>
When given, and the repository to clone from is accessed via ssh, this specifies a non-default path for the command run on the other end.
--template=<template-directory>
Specify the directory from which templates will be used; (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section of the section called “git-init(1)”.)
-c <key>=<value> , --config <key>=<value>

Set a configuration variable in the newly-created repository; this takes effect immediately after the repository is initialized, but before the remote history is fetched or any files checked out. The <key> is in the same format as expected by the section called “git-config(1)” (e.g., core.eol=true). If multiple values are given for the same key, each value will be written to the config file. This makes it safe, for example, to add additional fetch refspecs to the origin remote.

Due to limitations of the current implementation, some configuration variables do not take effect until after the initial fetch and checkout. Configuration variables known to not take effect are: remote.<name>.mirror and remote.<name>.tagOpt. Use the corresponding --mirror and --no-tags options instead.

--depth <depth>
Create a shallow clone with a history truncated to the specified number of commits. Implies --single-branch unless --no-single-branch is given to fetch the histories near the tips of all branches. If you want to clone submodules shallowly, also pass --shallow-submodules.
--shallow-since=<date>
Create a shallow clone with a history after the specified time.
--shallow-exclude=<ref>
Create a shallow clone with a history, excluding commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This option can be specified multiple times.
--[no-]single-branch
Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch, either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch remote's HEAD points at. Further fetches into the resulting repository will only update the remote-tracking branch for the branch this option was used for the initial cloning. If the HEAD at the remote did not point at any branch when --single-branch clone was made, no remote-tracking branch is created.
--[no-]tags

Control whether or not tags will be cloned. When --no-tags is given, the option will be become permanent by setting the remote.<remote>.tagOpt=--no-tags configuration. This ensures that future git pull and git fetch won't follow any tags. Subsequent explicit tag fetches will still work (see the section called “git-fetch(1)”).

By default, tags are cloned and passing --tags is thus typically a no-op, unless it cancels out a previous --no-tags.

Can be used in conjunction with --single-branch to clone and maintain a branch with no references other than a single cloned branch. This is useful e.g. to maintain minimal clones of the default branch of some repository for search indexing.

--recurse-submodules[=<pathspec>]

After the clone is created, initialize and clone submodules within based on the provided <pathspec>. If no =<pathspec> is provided, all submodules are initialized and cloned. This option can be given multiple times for pathspecs consisting of multiple entries. The resulting clone has submodule.active set to the provided pathspec, or "." (meaning all submodules) if no pathspec is provided.

Submodules are initialized and cloned using their default settings. This is equivalent to running git submodule update --init --recursive <pathspec> immediately after the clone is finished. This option is ignored if the cloned repository does not have a worktree/checkout (i.e. if any of --no-checkout/-n, --bare, or --mirror is given)

--[no-]shallow-submodules
All submodules which are cloned will be shallow with a depth of 1.
--[no-]remote-submodules
All submodules which are cloned will use the status of the submodule's remote-tracking branch to update the submodule, rather than the superproject's recorded SHA-1. Equivalent to passing --remote to git submodule update.
--separate-git-dir=<git-dir>
Instead of placing the cloned repository where it is supposed to be, place the cloned repository at the specified directory, then make a filesystem-agnostic Git symbolic link to there. The result is Git repository can be separated from working tree.
--ref-format=<ref-format>

Specify the given ref storage format for the repository. The valid values are:

  • files for loose files with packed-refs. This is the default.
  • reftable for the reftable format. This format is experimental and its internals are subject to change.
-j <n> , --jobs <n>
The number of submodules fetched at the same time. Defaults to the submodule.fetchJobs option.
<repository>
The (possibly remote) <repository> to clone from. See the GIT URLS section below for more information on specifying repositories.
<directory>
The name of a new directory to clone into. The "humanish" part of the source repository is used if no <directory> is explicitly given (repo for /path/to/repo.git and foo for host.xz:foo/.git). Cloning into an existing directory is only allowed if the directory is empty.
--bundle-uri=<uri>
Before fetching from the remote, fetch a bundle from the given <uri> and unbundle the data into the local repository. The refs in the bundle will be stored under the hidden refs/bundle/* namespace. This option is incompatible with --depth, --shallow-since, and --shallow-exclude.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository. Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and deprecated; do not use them).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • http[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • ftp[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:

  • [<user>@]<host>:/<path-to-git-repo>

This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a colon. For example the local path foo:bar could be specified as an absolute path or ./foo:bar to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh url.

The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~<username> expansion:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • [<user>@]<host>:~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following syntaxes may be used:

  • /path/to/repo.git/
  • file:///path/to/repo.git/

These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except the former implies --local option.

git clone, git fetch and git pull, but not git push, will also accept a suitable bundle file. See the section called “git-bundle(1)”.

When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it attempts to use the remote-<transport> remote helper, if one exists. To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax may be used:

  • <transport>::<address>

where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being invoked. See the section called “gitremote-helpers(7)” for details.

If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories and you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs you use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                insteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "git://git.host.xz/"]
                insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
                insteadOf = work:

a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be "git://git.host.xz/repo.git".

If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                pushInsteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "ssh://example.org/"]
                pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/

a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to "ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still use the original URL.

EXAMPLES

  • Clone from upstream:

    $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/.../linux.git my-linux
    $ cd my-linux
    $ make
  • Make a local clone that borrows from the current directory, without checking things out:

    $ git clone -l -s -n . ../copy
    $ cd ../copy
    $ git show-branch
  • Clone from upstream while borrowing from an existing local directory:

    $ git clone --reference /git/linux.git \
            git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/.../linux.git \
            my-linux
    $ cd my-linux
  • Create a bare repository to publish your changes to the public:

    $ git clone --bare -l /home/proj/.git /pub/scm/proj.git
  • Clone a local repository from a different user:

    $ git clone --no-local /home/otheruser/proj.git /pub/scm/proj.git

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

init.templateDir
Specify the directory from which templates will be copied. (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section of the section called “git-init(1)”.)
init.defaultBranch
Allows overriding the default branch name e.g. when initializing a new repository.
init.defaultObjectFormat
Allows overriding the default object format for new repositories. See --object-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_HASH environment variable take precedence over this config.
init.defaultRefFormat
Allows overriding the default ref storage format for new repositories. See --ref-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_REF_FORMAT environment variable take precedence over this config.
clone.defaultRemoteName
The name of the remote to create when cloning a repository. Defaults to origin. It can be overridden by passing the --origin command-line option.
clone.rejectShallow
Reject cloning a repository if it is a shallow one; this can be overridden by passing the --reject-shallow option on the command line.
clone.filterSubmodules
If a partial clone filter is provided (see --filter in the section called “git-rev-list(1)”) and --recurse-submodules is used, also apply the filter to submodules.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-column(1)

NAME

git-column - Display data in columns

SYNOPSIS

git column [--command=<name>] [--[raw-]mode=<mode>] [--width=<width>]
             [--indent=<string>] [--nl=<string>] [--padding=<n>]

DESCRIPTION

This command formats the lines of its standard input into a table with multiple columns. Each input line occupies one cell of the table. It is used internally by other git commands to format output into columns.

OPTIONS

--command=<name>
Look up layout mode using configuration variable column.<name> and column.ui.
--mode=<mode>
Specify layout mode. See configuration variable column.ui for option syntax in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--raw-mode=<n>
Same as --mode but take mode encoded as a number. This is mainly used by other commands that have already parsed layout mode.
--width=<width>
Specify the terminal width. By default git column will detect the terminal width, or fall back to 80 if it is unable to do so.
--indent=<string>
String to be printed at the beginning of each line.
--nl=<string>
String to be printed at the end of each line, including newline character.
--padding=<N>
The number of spaces between columns. One space by default.

EXAMPLES

Format data by columns:

$ seq 1 24 | git column --mode=column --padding=5
1      4      7      10     13     16     19     22
2      5      8      11     14     17     20     23
3      6      9      12     15     18     21     24

Format data by rows:

$ seq 1 21 | git column --mode=row --padding=5
1      2      3      4      5      6      7
8      9      10     11     12     13     14
15     16     17     18     19     20     21

List some tags in a table with unequal column widths:

$ git tag --list 'v2.4.*' --column=row,dense
v2.4.0  v2.4.0-rc0  v2.4.0-rc1  v2.4.0-rc2  v2.4.0-rc3
v2.4.1  v2.4.10     v2.4.11     v2.4.12     v2.4.2
v2.4.3  v2.4.4      v2.4.5      v2.4.6      v2.4.7
v2.4.8  v2.4.9

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

column.ui

Specify whether supported commands should output in columns. This variable consists of a list of tokens separated by spaces or commas:

These options control when the feature should be enabled (defaults to never):

always
always show in columns
never
never show in columns
auto
show in columns if the output is to the terminal

These options control layout (defaults to column). Setting any of these implies always if none of always, never, or auto are specified.

column
fill columns before rows
row
fill rows before columns
plain
show in one column

Finally, these options can be combined with a layout option (defaults to nodense):

dense
make unequal size columns to utilize more space
nodense
make equal size columns
column.branch
Specify whether to output branch listing in git branch in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.clean
Specify the layout when listing items in git clean -i, which always shows files and directories in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.status
Specify whether to output untracked files in git status in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.tag
Specify whether to output tag listings in git tag in columns. See column.ui for details.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-commit-graph(1)

NAME

git-commit-graph - Write and verify Git commit-graph files

SYNOPSIS

git commit-graph verify [--object-dir <dir>] [--shallow] [--[no-]progress]
git commit-graph write [--object-dir <dir>] [--append]
                        [--split[=<strategy>]] [--reachable | --stdin-packs | --stdin-commits]
                        [--changed-paths] [--[no-]max-new-filters <n>] [--[no-]progress]
                        <split-options>

DESCRIPTION

Manage the serialized commit-graph file.

OPTIONS

--object-dir
Use given directory for the location of packfiles and commit-graph file. This parameter exists to specify the location of an alternate that only has the objects directory, not a full .git directory. The commit-graph file is expected to be in the <dir>/info directory and the packfiles are expected to be in <dir>/pack. If the directory could not be made into an absolute path, or does not match any known object directory, git commit-graph ... will exit with non-zero status.
--[no-]progress
Turn progress on/off explicitly. If neither is specified, progress is shown if standard error is connected to a terminal.

COMMANDS

write

Write a commit-graph file based on the commits found in packfiles. If the config option core.commitGraph is disabled, then this command will output a warning, then return success without writing a commit-graph file.

With the --stdin-packs option, generate the new commit graph by walking objects only in the specified pack-indexes. (Cannot be combined with --stdin-commits or --reachable.)

With the --stdin-commits option, generate the new commit graph by walking commits starting at the commits specified in stdin as a list of OIDs in hex, one OID per line. OIDs that resolve to non-commits (either directly, or by peeling tags) are silently ignored. OIDs that are malformed, or do not exist generate an error. (Cannot be combined with --stdin-packs or --reachable.)

With the --reachable option, generate the new commit graph by walking commits starting at all refs. (Cannot be combined with --stdin-commits or --stdin-packs.)

With the --append option, include all commits that are present in the existing commit-graph file.

With the --changed-paths option, compute and write information about the paths changed between a commit and its first parent. This operation can take a while on large repositories. It provides significant performance gains for getting history of a directory or a file with git log -- <path>. If this option is given, future commit-graph writes will automatically assume that this option was intended. Use --no-changed-paths to stop storing this data.

With the --max-new-filters=<n> option, generate at most n new Bloom filters (if --changed-paths is specified). If n is -1, no limit is enforced. Only commits present in the new layer count against this limit. To retroactively compute Bloom filters over earlier layers, it is advised to use --split=replace. Overrides the commitGraph.maxNewFilters configuration.

With the --split[=<strategy>] option, write the commit-graph as a chain of multiple commit-graph files stored in <dir>/info/commit-graphs. Commit-graph layers are merged based on the strategy and other splitting options. The new commits not already in the commit-graph are added in a new "tip" file. This file is merged with the existing file if the following merge conditions are met:

  • If --split=no-merge is specified, a merge is never performed, and the remaining options are ignored. --split=replace overwrites the existing chain with a new one. A bare --split defers to the remaining options. (Note that merging a chain of commit graphs replaces the existing chain with a length-1 chain where the first and only incremental holds the entire graph).
  • If --size-multiple=<X> is not specified, let X equal 2. If the new tip file would have N commits and the previous tip has M commits and X times N is greater than M, instead merge the two files into a single file.
  • If --max-commits=<M> is specified with M a positive integer, and the new tip file would have more than M commits, then instead merge the new tip with the previous tip.

    Finally, if --expire-time=<datetime> is not specified, let datetime be the current time. After writing the split commit-graph, delete all unused commit-graph whose modified times are older than datetime.

verify

Read the commit-graph file and verify its contents against the object database. Used to check for corrupted data.

With the --shallow option, only check the tip commit-graph file in a chain of split commit-graphs.

EXAMPLES

  • Write a commit-graph file for the packed commits in your local .git directory.

    $ git commit-graph write
  • Write a commit-graph file, extending the current commit-graph file using commits in <pack-index>.

    $ echo <pack-index> | git commit-graph write --stdin-packs
  • Write a commit-graph file containing all reachable commits.

    $ git show-ref -s | git commit-graph write --stdin-commits
  • Write a commit-graph file containing all commits in the current commit-graph file along with those reachable from HEAD.

    $ git rev-parse HEAD | git commit-graph write --stdin-commits --append

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

commitGraph.generationVersion
Specifies the type of generation number version to use when writing or reading the commit-graph file. If version 1 is specified, then the corrected commit dates will not be written or read. Defaults to 2.
commitGraph.maxNewFilters
Specifies the default value for the --max-new-filters option of git commit-graph write (c.f., the section called “git-commit-graph(1)”).
commitGraph.readChangedPaths
Deprecated. Equivalent to commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=-1 if true, and commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=0 if false. (If commitGraph.changedPathVersion is also set, commitGraph.changedPathsVersion takes precedence.)
commitGraph.changedPathsVersion

Specifies the version of the changed-path Bloom filters that Git will read and write. May be -1, 0, 1, or 2. Note that values greater than 1 may be incompatible with older versions of Git which do not yet understand those versions. Use caution when operating in a mixed-version environment.

Defaults to -1.

If -1, Git will use the version of the changed-path Bloom filters in the repository, defaulting to 1 if there are none.

If 0, Git will not read any Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters when instructed to write.

If 1, Git will only read version 1 Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters.

If 2, Git will only read version 2 Bloom filters, and will write version 2 Bloom filters.

See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)” for more information.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-commit-tree(1)

NAME

git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object

SYNOPSIS

git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)…]
git commit-tree [(-p <parent>)…] [-S[<keyid>]] [(-m <message>)…]
                  [(-F <file>)…] <tree>

DESCRIPTION

This is usually not what an end user wants to run directly. See the section called “git-commit(1)” instead.

Creates a new commit object based on the provided tree object and emits the new commit object id on stdout. The log message is read from the standard input, unless -m or -F options are given.

The -m and -F options can be given any number of times, in any order. The commit log message will be composed in the order in which the options are given.

A commit object may have any number of parents. With exactly one parent, it is an ordinary commit. Having more than one parent makes the commit a merge between several lines of history. Initial (root) commits have no parents.

While a tree represents a particular directory state of a working directory, a commit represents that state in "time", and explains how to get there.

Normally a commit would identify a new "HEAD" state, and while Git doesn't care where you save the note about that state, in practice we tend to just write the result to the file that is pointed at by .git/HEAD, so that we can always see what the last committed state was.

OPTIONS

<tree>
An existing tree object.
-p <parent>
Each -p indicates the id of a parent commit object.
-m <message>
A paragraph in the commit log message. This can be given more than once and each <message> becomes its own paragraph.
-F <file>
Read the commit log message from the given file. Use - to read from the standard input. This can be given more than once and the content of each file becomes its own paragraph.
-S[<keyid>] , --gpg-sign[=<keyid>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand a --gpg-sign option given earlier on the command line.

Commit Information

A commit encapsulates:

  • all parent object ids
  • author name, email and date
  • committer name and email and the commit time.

A commit comment is read from stdin. If a changelog entry is not provided via "<" redirection, git commit-tree will just wait for one to be entered and terminated with ^D.

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:

Git internal format
It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where <unix-timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. <time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.
RFC 2822
The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.
ISO 8601

Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the T character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as 2005-04-07T22:13:13.

Note

In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.

Discussion

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

  • The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
  • Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), the section called “gitignore(5)”, the section called “gitattributes(5)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

    Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

  • Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

FILES

/etc/mailname

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-commit(1)

NAME

git-commit - Record changes to the repository

SYNOPSIS

git commit [-a | --interactive | --patch] [-s] [-v] [-u[<mode>]] [--amend]
           [--dry-run] [(-c | -C | --squash<commit> | --fixup [(amend|reword):]<commit>]
           [-F <file> | -m <msg>] [--reset-author] [--allow-empty]
           [--allow-empty-message] [--no-verify] [-e] [--author=<author>]
           [--date=<date>] [--cleanup=<mode>] [--[no-]status]
           [-i | -o] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
           [(--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>])] [-S[<keyid>]]
           [--] [<pathspec>]

DESCRIPTION

Create a new commit containing the current contents of the index and the given log message describing the changes. The new commit is a direct child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and the branch is updated to point to it (unless no branch is associated with the working tree, in which case HEAD is "detached" as described in the section called “git-checkout(1)”).

The content to be committed can be specified in several ways:

  1. by using the section called “git-add(1)” to incrementally "add" changes to the index before using the commit command (Note: even modified files must be "added");
  2. by using the section called “git-rm(1)” to remove files from the working tree and the index, again before using the commit command;
  3. by listing files as arguments to the commit command (without --interactive or --patch switch), in which case the commit will ignore changes staged in the index, and instead record the current content of the listed files (which must already be known to Git);
  4. by using the -a switch with the commit command to automatically "add" changes from all known files (i.e. all files that are already listed in the index) and to automatically "rm" files in the index that have been removed from the working tree, and then perform the actual commit;
  5. by using the --interactive or --patch switches with the commit command to decide one by one which files or hunks should be part of the commit in addition to contents in the index, before finalizing the operation. See the Interactive Mode section of the section called “git-add(1)” to learn how to operate these modes.

The --dry-run option can be used to obtain a summary of what is included by any of the above for the next commit by giving the same set of parameters (options and paths).

If you make a commit and then find a mistake immediately after that, you can recover from it with git reset.

OPTIONS

-a , --all
Automatically stage files that have been modified and deleted, but new files you have not told Git about are not affected.
-p , --patch
Use the interactive patch selection interface to choose which changes to commit. See the section called “git-add(1)” for details.
-C <commit> , --reuse-message=<commit>
Take an existing <commit> object, and reuse the log message and the authorship information (including the timestamp) when creating the commit.
-c <commit> , --reedit-message=<commit>
Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that the user can further edit the commit message.
--fixup=[(amend|reword):]<commit>

Create a new commit which "fixes up" <commit> when applied with git rebase --autosquash. Plain --fixup=<commit> creates a "fixup!" commit which changes the content of <commit> but leaves its log message untouched. --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but creates an "amend!" commit which also replaces the log message of <commit> with the log message of the "amend!" commit. --fixup=reword:<commit> creates an "amend!" commit which replaces the log message of <commit> with its own log message but makes no changes to the content of <commit>.

The commit created by plain --fixup=<commit> has a title composed of "fixup!" followed by the title of <commit>, and is recognized specially by git rebase --autosquash. The -m option may be used to supplement the log message of the created commit, but the additional commentary will be thrown away once the "fixup!" commit is squashed into <commit> by git rebase --autosquash.

The commit created by --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but its title is instead prefixed with "amend!". The log message of <commit> is copied into the log message of the "amend!" commit and opened in an editor so it can be refined. When git rebase --autosquash squashes the "amend!" commit into <commit>, the log message of <commit> is replaced by the refined log message from the "amend!" commit. It is an error for the "amend!" commit's log message to be empty unless --allow-empty-message is specified.

--fixup=reword:<commit> is shorthand for --fixup=amend:<commit> --only. It creates an "amend!" commit with only a log message (ignoring any changes staged in the index). When squashed by git rebase --autosquash, it replaces the log message of <commit> without making any other changes.

Neither "fixup!" nor "amend!" commits change authorship of <commit> when applied by git rebase --autosquash. See the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details.

--squash=<commit>
Construct a commit message for use with git rebase --autosquash. The commit message title is taken from the specified commit with a prefix of "squash! ". Can be used with additional commit message options (-m/-c/-C/-F). See the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details.
--reset-author
When used with -C/-c/--amend options, or when committing after a conflicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of the resulting commit now belongs to the committer. This also renews the author timestamp.
--short
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the short-format. See the section called “git-status(1)” for details. Implies --dry-run.
--branch
Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format.
--porcelain
When doing a dry-run, give the output in a porcelain-ready format. See the section called “git-status(1)” for details. Implies --dry-run.
--long
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the long-format. Implies --dry-run.
-z , --null
When showing short or porcelain status output, print the filename verbatim and terminate the entries with NUL, instead of LF. If no format is given, implies the --porcelain output format. Without the -z option, filenames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
-F <file> , --file=<file>
Take the commit message from <file>. Use - to read the message from the standard input.
--author=<author>
Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using the standard A U Thor <author@example.com> format. Otherwise <author> is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search for an existing commit by that author (i.e. git rev-list --all -i --author=<author>); the commit author is then copied from the first such commit found.
--date=<date>
Override the author date used in the commit.
-m <msg> , --message=<msg>

Use <msg> as the commit message. If multiple -m options are given, their values are concatenated as separate paragraphs.

The -m option is mutually exclusive with -c, -C, and -F.

-t <file> , --template=<file>
When editing the commit message, start the editor with the contents in <file>. The commit.template configuration variable is often used to give this option implicitly to the command. This mechanism can be used by projects that want to guide participants with some hints on what to write in the message in what order. If the user exits the editor without editing the message, the commit is aborted. This has no effect when a message is given by other means, e.g. with the -m or -F options.
-s , --signoff , --no-signoff

Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project to which you're committing. For example, it may certify that the committer has the rights to submit the work under the project's license or agrees to some contributor representation, such as a Developer Certificate of Origin. (See https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the Linux kernel and Git projects.) Consult the documentation or leadership of the project to which you're contributing to understand how the signoffs are used in that project.

The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff option on the command line.

--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>]
Specify a (<token>, <value>) pair that should be applied as a trailer. (e.g. git commit --trailer "Signed-off-by:C O Mitter \ <committer@example.com>" --trailer "Helped-by:C O Mitter \ <committer@example.com>" will add the Signed-off-by trailer and the Helped-by trailer to the commit message.) The trailer.* configuration variables (the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”) can be used to define if a duplicated trailer is omitted, where in the run of trailers each trailer would appear, and other details.
-n , --[no-]verify
Bypass the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks. See also the section called “githooks(5)”.
--allow-empty
Usually recording a commit that has the exact same tree as its sole parent commit is a mistake, and the command prevents you from making such a commit. This option bypasses the safety, and is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.
--allow-empty-message
Create a commit with an empty commit message without using plumbing commands like the section called “git-commit-tree(1)”. Like --allow-empty, this command is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.
--cleanup=<mode>

Determine how the supplied commit message should be cleaned up before committing. The <mode> can be strip, whitespace, verbatim, scissors or default.

strip
Strip leading and trailing empty lines, trailing whitespace, commentary and collapse consecutive empty lines.
whitespace
Same as strip except #commentary is not removed.
verbatim
Do not change the message at all.
scissors

Same as whitespace except that everything from (and including) the line found below is truncated, if the message is to be edited. "#" can be customized with core.commentChar.

# ------------------------ >8 ------------------------
default
Same as strip if the message is to be edited. Otherwise whitespace.

The default can be changed by the commit.cleanup configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

-e , --edit
Let the user further edit the message taken from <file> with -F <file>, command line with -m <message>, and from <commit> with -C <commit>.
--no-edit
Use the selected commit message without launching an editor. For example, git commit --amend --no-edit amends a commit without changing its commit message.
--amend

Replace the tip of the current branch by creating a new commit. The recorded tree is prepared as usual (including the effect of the -i and -o options and explicit pathspec), and the message from the original commit is used as the starting point, instead of an empty message, when no other message is specified from the command line via options such as -m, -F, -c, etc. The new commit has the same parents and author as the current one (the --reset-author option can countermand this).

It is a rough equivalent for:

        $ git reset --soft HEAD^
        $ ... do something else to come up with the right tree ...
        $ git commit -c ORIG_HEAD

but can be used to amend a merge commit.

You should understand the implications of rewriting history if you amend a commit that has already been published. (See the "RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in the section called “git-rebase(1)”.)

--no-post-rewrite
Bypass the post-rewrite hook.
-i , --include
Before making a commit out of staged contents so far, stage the contents of paths given on the command line as well. This is usually not what you want unless you are concluding a conflicted merge.
-o , --only
Make a commit by taking the updated working tree contents of the paths specified on the command line, disregarding any contents that have been staged for other paths. This is the default mode of operation of git commit if any paths are given on the command line, in which case this option can be omitted. If this option is specified together with --amend, then no paths need to be specified, which can be used to amend the last commit without committing changes that have already been staged. If used together with --allow-empty paths are also not required, and an empty commit will be created.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pass pathspec in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).
-u[<mode>] , --untracked-files[=<mode>]

Show untracked files.

The <mode> parameter is optional (defaults to all), and is used to specify the handling of untracked files; when -u is not used, the default is normal, i.e. show untracked files and directories.

The possible options are:

no
Show no untracked files
normal
Shows untracked files and directories
all
Also shows individual files in untracked directories.

All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal and false as no. The default can be changed using the status.showUntrackedFiles configuration variable documented in the section called “git-config(1)”.

-v , --verbose

Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would be committed at the bottom of the commit message template to help the user describe the commit by reminding what changes the commit has. Note that this diff output doesn't have its lines prefixed with #. This diff will not be a part of the commit message. See the commit.verbose configuration variable in the section called “git-config(1)”.

If specified twice, show in addition the unified diff between what would be committed and the worktree files, i.e. the unstaged changes to tracked files.

-q , --quiet
Suppress commit summary message.
--dry-run
Do not create a commit, but show a list of paths that are to be committed, paths with local changes that will be left uncommitted and paths that are untracked.
--status
Include the output of the section called “git-status(1)” in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to on, but can be used to override configuration variable commit.status.
--no-status
Do not include the output of the section called “git-status(1)” in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the default commit message.
-S[<key-id>] , --gpg-sign[=<key-id>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The <key-id> is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<pathspec>...

When <pathspec> is given on the command line, commit the contents of the files that match the pathspec without recording the changes already added to the index. The contents of these files are also staged for the next commit on top of what have been staged before.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

EXAMPLES

When recording your own work, the contents of modified files in your working tree are temporarily stored to a staging area called the "index" with git add. A file can be reverted back, only in the index but not in the working tree, to that of the last commit with git restore --staged <file>, which effectively reverts git add and prevents the changes to this file from participating in the next commit. After building the state to be committed incrementally with these commands, git commit (without any pathname parameter) is used to record what has been staged so far. This is the most basic form of the command. An example:

$ edit hello.c
$ git rm goodbye.c
$ git add hello.c
$ git commit

Instead of staging files after each individual change, you can tell git commit to notice the changes to the files whose contents are tracked in your working tree and do corresponding git add and git rm for you. That is, this example does the same as the earlier example if there is no other change in your working tree:

$ edit hello.c
$ rm goodbye.c
$ git commit -a

The command git commit -a first looks at your working tree, notices that you have modified hello.c and removed goodbye.c, and performs necessary git add and git rm for you.

After staging changes to many files, you can alter the order the changes are recorded in, by giving pathnames to git commit. When pathnames are given, the command makes a commit that only records the changes made to the named paths:

$ edit hello.c hello.h
$ git add hello.c hello.h
$ edit Makefile
$ git commit Makefile

This makes a commit that records the modification to Makefile. The changes staged for hello.c and hello.h are not included in the resulting commit. However, their changes are not lost -- they are still staged and merely held back. After the above sequence, if you do:

$ git commit

this second commit would record the changes to hello.c and hello.h as expected.

After a merge (initiated by git merge or git pull) stops because of conflicts, cleanly merged paths are already staged to be committed for you, and paths that conflicted are left in unmerged state. You would have to first check which paths are conflicting with git status and after fixing them manually in your working tree, you would stage the result as usual with git add:

$ git status | grep unmerged
unmerged: hello.c
$ edit hello.c
$ git add hello.c

After resolving conflicts and staging the result, git ls-files -u would stop mentioning the conflicted path. When you are done, run git commit to finally record the merge:

$ git commit

As with the case to record your own changes, you can use -a option to save typing. One difference is that during a merge resolution, you cannot use git commit with pathnames to alter the order the changes are committed, because the merge should be recorded as a single commit. In fact, the command refuses to run when given pathnames (but see -i option).

COMMIT INFORMATION

Author and committer information is taken from the following environment variables, if set:

  • GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
  • GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
  • GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
  • GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
  • GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
  • GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

(nb "<", ">" and "\n"s are stripped)

The author and committer names are by convention some form of a personal name (that is, the name by which other humans refer to you), although Git does not enforce or require any particular form. Arbitrary Unicode may be used, subject to the constraints listed above. This name has no effect on authentication; for that, see the credential.username variable in the section called “git-config(1)”.

In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the information is taken from the configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if not present, the environment variable EMAIL, or, if that is not set, system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (taken from /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname when that file does not exist).

The author.name and committer.name and their corresponding email options override user.name and user.email if set and are overridden themselves by the environment variables.

The typical usage is to set just the user.name and user.email variables; the other options are provided for more complex use cases.

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:

Git internal format
It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where <unix-timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. <time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.
RFC 2822
The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.
ISO 8601

Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the T character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as 2005-04-07T22:13:13.

Note

In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.

In addition to recognizing all date formats above, the --date option will also try to make sense of other, more human-centric date formats, such as relative dates like "yesterday" or "last Friday at noon".

DISCUSSION

Though not required, it's a good idea to begin the commit message with a single short (no more than 50 characters) line summarizing the change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description. The text up to the first blank line in a commit message is treated as the commit title, and that title is used throughout Git. For example, the section called “git-format-patch(1)” turns a commit into email, and it uses the title on the Subject line and the rest of the commit in the body.

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

  • The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
  • Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), the section called “gitignore(5)”, the section called “gitattributes(5)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

    Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

  • Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from the GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration variable, the VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment variable (in that order). See the section called “git-var(1)” for details.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

commit.cleanup
This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).
commit.gpgSign
A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.
commit.status
A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.
commit.template
Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.
commit.verbose
A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit.

HOOKS

This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit, post-commit and post-rewrite hooks. See the section called “githooks(5)” for more information.

FILES

$GIT_DIR/COMMIT_EDITMSG
This file contains the commit message of a commit in progress. If git commit exits due to an error before creating a commit, any commit message that has been provided by the user (e.g., in an editor session) will be available in this file, but will be overwritten by the next invocation of git commit.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-config(1)

NAME

git-config - Get and set repository or global options

SYNOPSIS

git config list [<file-option>] [<display-option>] [--includes]
git config get [<file-option>] [<display-option>] [--includes] [--all] [--regexp] [--value=<value>] [--fixed-value] [--default=<default>] <name>
git config set [<file-option>] [--type=<type>] [--all] [--value=<value>] [--fixed-value] <name> <value>
git config unset [<file-option>] [--all] [--value=<value>] [--fixed-value] <name>
git config rename-section [<file-option>] <old-name> <new-name>
git config remove-section [<file-option>] <name>
git config edit [<file-option>]
git config [<file-option>] --get-colorbool <name> [<stdout-is-tty>]

DESCRIPTION

You can query/set/replace/unset options with this command. The name is actually the section and the key separated by a dot, and the value will be escaped.

Multiple lines can be added to an option by using the --append option. If you want to update or unset an option which can occur on multiple lines, a value-pattern (which is an extended regular expression, unless the --fixed-value option is given) needs to be given. Only the existing values that match the pattern are updated or unset. If you want to handle the lines that do not match the pattern, just prepend a single exclamation mark in front (see also the section called “EXAMPLES”), but note that this only works when the --fixed-value option is not in use.

The --type=<type> option instructs git config to ensure that incoming and outgoing values are canonicalize-able under the given <type>. If no --type=<type> is given, no canonicalization will be performed. Callers may unset an existing --type specifier with --no-type.

When reading, the values are read from the system, global and repository local configuration files by default, and options --system, --global, --local, --worktree and --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to read from only that location (see the section called “FILES”).

When writing, the new value is written to the repository local configuration file by default, and options --system, --global, --worktree, --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to write to that location (you can say --local but that is the default).

This command will fail with non-zero status upon error. Some exit codes are:

  • The section or key is invalid (ret=1),
  • no section or name was provided (ret=2),
  • the config file is invalid (ret=3),
  • the config file cannot be written (ret=4),
  • you try to unset an option which does not exist (ret=5),
  • you try to unset/set an option for which multiple lines match (ret=5), or
  • you try to use an invalid regexp (ret=6).

On success, the command returns the exit code 0.

A list of all available configuration variables can be obtained using the git help --config command.

COMMANDS

list
List all variables set in config file, along with their values.
get
Emits the value of the specified key. If key is present multiple times in the configuration, emits the last value. If --all is specified, emits all values associated with key. Returns error code 1 if key is not present.
set
Set value for one or more config options. By default, this command refuses to write multi-valued config options. Passing --all will replace all multi-valued config options with the new value, whereas --value= will replace all config options whose values match the given pattern.
unset
Unset value for one or more config options. By default, this command refuses to unset multi-valued keys. Passing --all will unset all multi-valued config options, whereas --value will unset all config options whose values match the given pattern.
rename-section
Rename the given section to a new name.
remove-section
Remove the given section from the configuration file.
edit
Opens an editor to modify the specified config file; either --system, --global, --local (default), --worktree, or --file <config-file>.

OPTIONS

--replace-all
Default behavior is to replace at most one line. This replaces all lines matching the key (and optionally the value-pattern).
--append
Adds a new line to the option without altering any existing values. This is the same as providing --value=^$ in set.
--comment <message>

Append a comment at the end of new or modified lines.

If _<message>_ begins with one or more whitespaces followed
by "#", it is used as-is.  If it begins with "#", a space is
prepended before it is used.  Otherwise, a string " # " (a
space followed by a hash followed by a space) is prepended
to it.  And the resulting string is placed immediately after
the value defined for the variable.  The _<message>_ must
not contain linefeed characters (no multi-line comments are
permitted).
--all
With get, return all values for a multi-valued key.
--regexp
With get, interpret the name as a regular expression. Regular expression matching is currently case-sensitive and done against a canonicalized version of the key in which section and variable names are lowercased, but subsection names are not.
--url=<URL>
When given a two-part <name> as <section>.<key>, the value for <section>.<URL>.<key> whose <URL> part matches the best to the given URL is returned (if no such key exists, the value for <section>.<key> is used as a fallback). When given just the <section> as name, do so for all the keys in the section and list them. Returns error code 1 if no value is found.
--global

For writing options: write to global ~/.gitconfig file rather than the repository .git/config, write to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config file if this file exists and the ~/.gitconfig file doesn't.

For reading options: read only from global ~/.gitconfig and from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config rather than from all available files.

See also the section called “FILES”.

--system

For writing options: write to system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig rather than the repository .git/config.

For reading options: read only from system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig rather than from all available files.

See also the section called “FILES”.

--local

For writing options: write to the repository .git/config file. This is the default behavior.

For reading options: read only from the repository .git/config rather than from all available files.

See also the section called “FILES”.

--worktree
Similar to --local except that $GIT_DIR/config.worktree is read from or written to if extensions.worktreeConfig is enabled. If not it's the same as --local. Note that $GIT_DIR is equal to $GIT_COMMON_DIR for the main working tree, but is of the form $GIT_DIR/worktrees/<id>/ for other working trees. See the section called “git-worktree(1)” to learn how to enable extensions.worktreeConfig.
-f <config-file> , --file <config-file>

For writing options: write to the specified file rather than the repository .git/config.

For reading options: read only from the specified file rather than from all available files.

See also the section called “FILES”.

--blob <blob>
Similar to --file but use the given blob instead of a file. E.g. you can use master:.gitmodules to read values from the file .gitmodules in the master branch. See "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)” for a more complete list of ways to spell blob names.
--fixed-value
When used with the value-pattern argument, treat value-pattern as an exact string instead of a regular expression. This will restrict the name/value pairs that are matched to only those where the value is exactly equal to the value-pattern.
--type <type>

git config will ensure that any input or output is valid under the given type constraint(s), and will canonicalize outgoing values in <type>'s canonical form.

Valid <type>'s include:

  • bool: canonicalize values true, yes,on, and positive numbers as "true", and values false, no, off and 0 as "false".
  • int: canonicalize values as simple decimal numbers. An optional suffix of k, m, or g will cause the value to be multiplied by 1024, 1048576, or 1073741824 upon input.
  • bool-or-int: canonicalize according to either bool or int, as described above.
  • path: canonicalize by expanding a leading ~ to the value of $HOME and ~user to the home directory for the specified user. This specifier has no effect when setting the value (but you can use git config section.variable ~/ from the command line to let your shell do the expansion.)
  • expiry-date: canonicalize by converting from a fixed or relative date-string to a timestamp. This specifier has no effect when setting the value.
  • color: When getting a value, canonicalize by converting to an ANSI color escape sequence. When setting a value, a sanity-check is performed to ensure that the given value is canonicalize-able as an ANSI color, but it is written as-is.
--bool , --int , --bool-or-int , --path , --expiry-date
Historical options for selecting a type specifier. Prefer instead --type (see above).
--no-type
Un-sets the previously set type specifier (if one was previously set). This option requests that git config not canonicalize the retrieved variable. --no-type has no effect without --type=<type> or --<type>.
-z , --null
For all options that output values and/or keys, always end values with the null character (instead of a newline). Use newline instead as a delimiter between key and value. This allows for secure parsing of the output without getting confused e.g. by values that contain line breaks.
--name-only
Output only the names of config variables for list or get.
--show-origin
Augment the output of all queried config options with the origin type (file, standard input, blob, command line) and the actual origin (config file path, ref, or blob id if applicable).
--show-scope
Similar to --show-origin in that it augments the output of all queried config options with the scope of that value (worktree, local, global, system, command).
--get-colorbool <name> [<stdout-is-tty>]
Find the color setting for <name> (e.g. color.diff) and output "true" or "false". <stdout-is-tty> should be either "true" or "false", and is taken into account when configuration says "auto". If <stdout-is-tty> is missing, then checks the standard output of the command itself, and exits with status 0 if color is to be used, or exits with status 1 otherwise. When the color setting for name is undefined, the command uses color.ui as fallback.
--[no-]includes
Respect include.* directives in config files when looking up values. Defaults to off when a specific file is given (e.g., using --file, --global, etc) and on when searching all config files.
--default <value>
When using get, and the requested variable is not found, behave as if <value> were the value assigned to that variable.

DEPRECATED MODES

The following modes have been deprecated in favor of subcommands. It is recommended to migrate to the new syntax.

git config <name>
Replaced by git config get <name>.
git config <name> <value> [<value-pattern>]
Replaced by git config set [--value=<pattern>] <name> <value>.
-l , --list
Replaced by git config list.
--get <name> [<value-pattern>]
Replaced by git config get [--value=<pattern>] <name>.
--get-all <name> [<value-pattern>]
Replaced by git config get [--value=<pattern>] --all <name>.
--get-regexp <name-regexp>
Replaced by git config get --all --show-names --regexp <name-regexp>.
--get-urlmatch <name> <URL>
Replaced by git config get --all --show-names --url=<URL> <name>.
--get-color <name> [<default>]
Replaced by git config get --type=color [--default=<default>] <name>.
--add <name> <value>
Replaced by git config set --append <name> <value>.
--unset <name> [<value-pattern>]
Replaced by git config unset [--value=<pattern>] <name>.
--unset-all <name> [<value-pattern>]
Replaced by git config unset [--value=<pattern>] --all <name>.
--rename-section <old-name> <new-name>
Replaced by git config rename-section <old-name> <new-name>.
--remove-section <name>
Replaced by git config remove-section <name>.
-e , --edit
Replaced by git config edit.

CONFIGURATION

pager.config is only respected when listing configuration, i.e., when using list or get which may return multiple results. The default is to use a pager.

FILES

By default, git config will read configuration options from multiple files:

$(prefix)/etc/gitconfig
System-wide configuration file.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config , ~/.gitconfig

User-specific configuration files. When the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is not set or empty, $HOME/.config/ is used as $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

These are also called "global" configuration files. If both files exist, both files are read in the order given above.

$GIT_DIR/config
Repository specific configuration file.
$GIT_DIR/config.worktree
This is optional and is only searched when extensions.worktreeConfig is present in $GIT_DIR/config.

You may also provide additional configuration parameters when running any git command by using the -c option. See the section called “git(1)” for details.

Options will be read from all of these files that are available. If the global or the system-wide configuration files are missing or unreadable they will be ignored. If the repository configuration file is missing or unreadable, git config will exit with a non-zero error code. An error message is produced if the file is unreadable, but not if it is missing.

The files are read in the order given above, with last value found taking precedence over values read earlier. When multiple values are taken then all values of a key from all files will be used.

By default, options are only written to the repository specific configuration file. Note that this also affects options like set and unset. git config will only ever change one file at a time.

You can limit which configuration sources are read from or written to by specifying the path of a file with the --file option, or by specifying a configuration scope with --system, --global, --local, or --worktree. For more, see the section called “OPTIONS” above.

SCOPES

Each configuration source falls within a configuration scope. The scopes are:

system
$(prefix)/etc/gitconfig
global

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config

~/.gitconfig

local
$GIT_DIR/config
worktree
$GIT_DIR/config.worktree
command

GIT_CONFIG_{COUNT,KEY,VALUE} environment variables (see the section called “ENVIRONMENT” below)

the -c option

With the exception of command, each scope corresponds to a command line option: --system, --global, --local, --worktree.

When reading options, specifying a scope will only read options from the files within that scope. When writing options, specifying a scope will write to the files within that scope (instead of the repository specific configuration file). See the section called “OPTIONS” above for a complete description.

Most configuration options are respected regardless of the scope it is defined in, but some options are only respected in certain scopes. See the respective option's documentation for the full details.

Protected configuration

Protected configuration refers to the system, global, and command scopes. For security reasons, certain options are only respected when they are specified in protected configuration, and ignored otherwise.

Git treats these scopes as if they are controlled by the user or a trusted administrator. This is because an attacker who controls these scopes can do substantial harm without using Git, so it is assumed that the user's environment protects these scopes against attackers.

ENVIRONMENT

GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL , GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM
Take the configuration from the given files instead from global or system-level configuration. See the section called “git(1)” for details.
GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM
Whether to skip reading settings from the system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig file. See the section called “git(1)” for details.

See also the section called “FILES”.

GIT_CONFIG_COUNT , GIT_CONFIG_KEY_<n> , GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_<n>

If GIT_CONFIG_COUNT is set to a positive number, all environment pairs GIT_CONFIG_KEY_<n> and GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_<n> up to that number will be added to the process's runtime configuration. The config pairs are zero-indexed. Any missing key or value is treated as an error. An empty GIT_CONFIG_COUNT is treated the same as GIT_CONFIG_COUNT=0, namely no pairs are processed. These environment variables will override values in configuration files, but will be overridden by any explicit options passed via git -c.

This is useful for cases where you want to spawn multiple git commands with a common configuration but cannot depend on a configuration file, for example when writing scripts.

GIT_CONFIG
If no --file option is provided to git config, use the file given by GIT_CONFIG as if it were provided via --file. This variable has no effect on other Git commands, and is mostly for historical compatibility; there is generally no reason to use it instead of the --file option.

EXAMPLES

Given a .git/config like this:

#
# This is the config file, and
# a '#' or ';' character indicates
# a comment
#

; core variables
[core]
        ; Don't trust file modes
        filemode = false

; Our diff algorithm
[diff]
        external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
        renames = true

; Proxy settings
[core]
        gitproxy=proxy-command for kernel.org
        gitproxy=default-proxy ; for all the rest

; HTTP
[http]
        sslVerify
[http "https://weak.example.com"]
        sslVerify = false
        cookieFile = /tmp/cookie.txt

you can set the filemode to true with

% git config set core.filemode true

The hypothetical proxy command entries actually have a postfix to discern what URL they apply to. Here is how to change the entry for kernel.org to "ssh".

% git config set --value='for kernel.org$' core.gitproxy '"ssh" for kernel.org'

This makes sure that only the key/value pair for kernel.org is replaced.

To delete the entry for renames, do

% git config unset diff.renames

If you want to delete an entry for a multivar (like core.gitproxy above), you have to provide a regex matching the value of exactly one line.

To query the value for a given key, do

% git config get core.filemode

or, to query a multivar:

% git config get --value="for kernel.org$" core.gitproxy

If you want to know all the values for a multivar, do:

% git config get --all --show-names core.gitproxy

If you like to live dangerously, you can replace all core.gitproxy by a new one with

% git config set --all core.gitproxy ssh

However, if you really only want to replace the line for the default proxy, i.e. the one without a "for …" postfix, do something like this:

% git config set --value='! for ' core.gitproxy ssh

To actually match only values with an exclamation mark, you have to

% git config set --value='[!]' section.key value

To add a new proxy, without altering any of the existing ones, use

% git config set --append core.gitproxy '"proxy-command" for example.com'

An example to use customized color from the configuration in your script:

#!/bin/sh
WS=$(git config get --type=color --default="blue reverse" color.diff.whitespace)
RESET=$(git config get --type=color --default="reset" "")
echo "${WS}your whitespace color or blue reverse${RESET}"

For URLs in https://weak.example.com, http.sslVerify is set to false, while it is set to true for all others:

% git config get --type=bool --url=https://good.example.com http.sslverify
true
% git config get --type=bool --url=https://weak.example.com http.sslverify
false
% git config get --url=https://weak.example.com http
http.cookieFile /tmp/cookie.txt
http.sslverify false

CONFIGURATION FILE

The Git configuration file contains a number of variables that affect the Git commands' behavior. The files .git/config and optionally config.worktree (see the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-worktree(1)”) in each repository are used to store the configuration for that repository, and $HOME/.gitconfig is used to store a per-user configuration as fallback values for the .git/config file. The file /etc/gitconfig can be used to store a system-wide default configuration.

The configuration variables are used by both the Git plumbing and the porcelain commands. The variables are divided into sections, wherein the fully qualified variable name of the variable itself is the last dot-separated segment and the section name is everything before the last dot. The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character. Some variables may appear multiple times; we say then that the variable is multivalued.

Syntax

The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive. Whitespace characters, which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored. The # and ; characters begin comments to the end of line. Blank lines are ignored.

The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins. Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, - and . are allowed in section names. Each variable must belong to some section, which means that there must be a section header before the first setting of a variable.

Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header, like in the example below:

        [section "subsection"]

Subsection names are case sensitive and can contain any characters except newline and the null byte. Doublequote " and backslash can be included by escaping them as \" and \\, respectively. Backslashes preceding other characters are dropped when reading; for example, \t is read as t and \0 is read as 0. Section headers cannot span multiple lines. Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection. You can have [section] if you have [section "subsection"], but you don't need to.

There is also a deprecated [section.subsection] syntax. With this syntax, the subsection name is converted to lower-case and is also compared case sensitively. These subsection names follow the same restrictions as section names.

All the other lines (and the remainder of the line after the section header) are recognized as setting variables, in the form name = value (or just name, which is a short-hand to say that the variable is the boolean "true"). The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character.

Whitespace characters surrounding name, = and value are discarded. Internal whitespace characters within value are retained verbatim. Comments starting with either # or ; and extending to the end of line are discarded. A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by ending it with a backslash (\); the backslash and the end-of-line characters are discarded.

If value needs to contain leading or trailing whitespace characters, it must be enclosed in double quotation marks ("). Inside double quotation marks, double quote (") and backslash (\) characters must be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

The following escape sequences (beside \" and \\) are recognized: \n for newline character (NL), \t for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB) and \b for backspace (BS). Other char escape sequences (including octal escape sequences) are invalid.

Includes

The include and includeIf sections allow you to include config directives from another source. These sections behave identically to each other with the exception that includeIf sections may be ignored if their condition does not evaluate to true; see "Conditional includes" below.

You can include a config file from another by setting the special include.path (or includeIf.*.path) variable to the name of the file to be included. The variable takes a pathname as its value, and is subject to tilde expansion. These variables can be given multiple times.

The contents of the included file are inserted immediately, as if they had been found at the location of the include directive. If the value of the variable is a relative path, the path is considered to be relative to the configuration file in which the include directive was found. See below for examples.

Conditional includes

You can conditionally include a config file from another by setting an includeIf.<condition>.path variable to the name of the file to be included.

The condition starts with a keyword followed by a colon and some data whose format and meaning depends on the keyword. Supported keywords are:

gitdir

The data that follows the keyword gitdir: is used as a glob pattern. If the location of the .git directory matches the pattern, the include condition is met.

The .git location may be auto-discovered, or come from $GIT_DIR environment variable. If the repository is auto-discovered via a .git file (e.g. from submodules, or a linked worktree), the .git location would be the final location where the .git directory is, not where the .git file is.

The pattern can contain standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. Please refer to the section called “gitignore(5)” for details. For convenience:

  • If the pattern starts with ~/, ~ will be substituted with the content of the environment variable HOME.
  • If the pattern starts with ./, it is replaced with the directory containing the current config file.
  • If the pattern does not start with either ~/, ./ or /, **/ will be automatically prepended. For example, the pattern foo/bar becomes **/foo/bar and would match /any/path/to/foo/bar.
  • If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches "foo" and everything inside, recursively.
gitdir/i
This is the same as gitdir except that matching is done case-insensitively (e.g. on case-insensitive file systems)
onbranch

The data that follows the keyword onbranch: is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. If we are in a worktree where the name of the branch that is currently checked out matches the pattern, the include condition is met.

If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches all branches that begin with foo/. This is useful if your branches are organized hierarchically and you would like to apply a configuration to all the branches in that hierarchy.

hasconfig:remote.*.url:

The data that follows this keyword is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple components. The first time this keyword is seen, the rest of the config files will be scanned for remote URLs (without applying any values). If there exists at least one remote URL that matches this pattern, the include condition is met.

Files included by this option (directly or indirectly) are not allowed to contain remote URLs.

Note that unlike other includeIf conditions, resolving this condition relies on information that is not yet known at the point of reading the condition. A typical use case is this option being present as a system-level or global-level config, and the remote URL being in a local-level config; hence the need to scan ahead when resolving this condition. In order to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem in which potentially-included files can affect whether such files are potentially included, Git breaks the cycle by prohibiting these files from affecting the resolution of these conditions (thus, prohibiting them from declaring remote URLs).

As for the naming of this keyword, it is for forwards compatibility with a naming scheme that supports more variable-based include conditions, but currently Git only supports the exact keyword described above.

A few more notes on matching via gitdir and gitdir/i:

  • Symlinks in $GIT_DIR are not resolved before matching.
  • Both the symlink & realpath versions of paths will be matched outside of $GIT_DIR. E.g. if ~/git is a symlink to /mnt/storage/git, both gitdir:~/git and gitdir:/mnt/storage/git will match.

    This was not the case in the initial release of this feature in v2.13.0, which only matched the realpath version. Configuration that wants to be compatible with the initial release of this feature needs to either specify only the realpath version, or both versions.

  • Note that "../" is not special and will match literally, which is unlikely what you want.

Example

# Core variables
[core]
        ; Don't trust file modes
        filemode = false

# Our diff algorithm
[diff]
        external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
        renames = true

[branch "devel"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/devel

# Proxy settings
[core]
        gitProxy="ssh" for "kernel.org"
        gitProxy=default-proxy ; for the rest

[include]
        path = /path/to/foo.inc ; include by absolute path
        path = foo.inc ; find "foo.inc" relative to the current file
        path = ~/foo.inc ; find "foo.inc" in your `$HOME` directory

; include if $GIT_DIR is /path/to/foo/.git
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/foo/.git"]
        path = /path/to/foo.inc

; include for all repositories inside /path/to/group
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/group/"]
        path = /path/to/foo.inc

; include for all repositories inside $HOME/to/group
[includeIf "gitdir:~/to/group/"]
        path = /path/to/foo.inc

; relative paths are always relative to the including
; file (if the condition is true); their location is not
; affected by the condition
[includeIf "gitdir:/path/to/group/"]
        path = foo.inc

; include only if we are in a worktree where foo-branch is
; currently checked out
[includeIf "onbranch:foo-branch"]
        path = foo.inc

; include only if a remote with the given URL exists (note
; that such a URL may be provided later in a file or in a
; file read after this file is read, as seen in this example)
[includeIf "hasconfig:remote.*.url:https://example.com/**"]
        path = foo.inc
[remote "origin"]
        url = https://example.com/git

Values

Values of many variables are treated as a simple string, but there are variables that take values of specific types and there are rules as to how to spell them.

boolean

When a variable is said to take a boolean value, many synonyms are accepted for true and false; these are all case-insensitive.

true
Boolean true literals are yes, on, true, and 1. Also, a variable defined without = <value> is taken as true.
false

Boolean false literals are no, off, false, 0 and the empty string.

When converting a value to its canonical form using the --type=bool type specifier, git config will ensure that the output is "true" or "false" (spelled in lowercase).

integer
The value for many variables that specify various sizes can be suffixed with k, M,… to mean "scale the number by 1024", "by 1024x1024", etc.
color

The value for a variable that takes a color is a list of colors (at most two, one for foreground and one for background) and attributes (as many as you want), separated by spaces.

The basic colors accepted are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white and default. The first color given is the foreground; the second is the background. All the basic colors except normal and default have a bright variant that can be specified by prefixing the color with bright, like brightred.

The color normal makes no change to the color. It is the same as an empty string, but can be used as the foreground color when specifying a background color alone (for example, "normal red").

The color default explicitly resets the color to the terminal default, for example to specify a cleared background. Although it varies between terminals, this is usually not the same as setting to "white black".

Colors may also be given as numbers between 0 and 255; these use ANSI 256-color mode (but note that not all terminals may support this). If your terminal supports it, you may also specify 24-bit RGB values as hex, like #ff0ab3, or 12-bit RGB values like #f1b, which is equivalent to the 24-bit color #ff11bb.

The accepted attributes are bold, dim, ul, blink, reverse, italic, and strike (for crossed-out or "strikethrough" letters). The position of any attributes with respect to the colors (before, after, or in between), doesn't matter. Specific attributes may be turned off by prefixing them with no or no- (e.g., noreverse, no-ul, etc).

The pseudo-attribute reset resets all colors and attributes before applying the specified coloring. For example, reset green will result in a green foreground and default background without any active attributes.

An empty color string produces no color effect at all. This can be used to avoid coloring specific elements without disabling color entirely.

For git's pre-defined color slots, the attributes are meant to be reset at the beginning of each item in the colored output. So setting color.decorate.branch to black will paint that branch name in a plain black, even if the previous thing on the same output line (e.g. opening parenthesis before the list of branch names in log --decorate output) is set to be painted with bold or some other attribute. However, custom log formats may do more complicated and layered coloring, and the negated forms may be useful there.

pathname

A variable that takes a pathname value can be given a string that begins with "~/" or "~user/", and the usual tilde expansion happens to such a string: ~/ is expanded to the value of $HOME, and ~user/ to the specified user's home directory.

If a path starts with %(prefix)/, the remainder is interpreted as a path relative to Git's "runtime prefix", i.e. relative to the location where Git itself was installed. For example, %(prefix)/bin/ refers to the directory in which the Git executable itself lives. If Git was compiled without runtime prefix support, the compiled-in prefix will be substituted instead. In the unlikely event that a literal path needs to be specified that should not be expanded, it needs to be prefixed by ./, like so: ./%(prefix)/bin.

Variables

Note that this list is non-comprehensive and not necessarily complete. For command-specific variables, you will find a more detailed description in the appropriate manual page.

Other git-related tools may and do use their own variables. When inventing new variables for use in your own tool, make sure their names do not conflict with those that are used by Git itself and other popular tools, and describe them in your documentation.

add.ignoreErrors , add.ignore-errors (deprecated)
Tells git add to continue adding files when some files cannot be added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the --ignore-errors option of the section called “git-add(1)”. add.ignore-errors is deprecated, as it does not follow the usual naming convention for configuration variables.
advice.*

These variables control various optional help messages designed to aid new users. When left unconfigured, Git will give the message alongside instructions on how to squelch it. You can tell Git that you have understood the issue and no longer need a specific help message by setting the corresponding variable to false.

As they are intended to help human users, these messages are output to the standard error. When tools that run Git as a subprocess find them disruptive, they can set GIT_ADVICE=0 in the environment to squelch all advice messages.

addEmbeddedRepo
Shown when the user accidentally adds one git repo inside of another.
addEmptyPathspec
Shown when the user runs git add without providing the pathspec parameter.
addIgnoredFile
Shown when the user attempts to add an ignored file to the index.
amWorkDir
Shown when the section called “git-am(1)” fails to apply a patch file, to tell the user the location of the file.
ambiguousFetchRefspec
Shown when a fetch refspec for multiple remotes maps to the same remote-tracking branch namespace and causes branch tracking set-up to fail.
checkoutAmbiguousRemoteBranchName
Shown when the argument to the section called “git-checkout(1)” and the section called “git-switch(1)” ambiguously resolves to a remote tracking branch on more than one remote in situations where an unambiguous argument would have otherwise caused a remote-tracking branch to be checked out. See the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable for how to set a given remote to be used by default in some situations where this advice would be printed.
commitBeforeMerge
Shown when the section called “git-merge(1)” refuses to merge to avoid overwriting local changes.
detachedHead
Shown when the user uses the section called “git-switch(1)” or the section called “git-checkout(1)” to move to the detached HEAD state, to tell the user how to create a local branch after the fact.
diverging
Shown when a fast-forward is not possible.
fetchShowForcedUpdates
Shown when the section called “git-fetch(1)” takes a long time to calculate forced updates after ref updates, or to warn that the check is disabled.
forceDeleteBranch
Shown when the user tries to delete a not fully merged branch without the force option set.
ignoredHook
Shown when a hook is ignored because the hook is not set as executable.
implicitIdentity
Shown when the user's information is guessed from the system username and domain name, to tell the user how to set their identity configuration.
mergeConflict
Shown when various commands stop because of conflicts.
nestedTag
Shown when a user attempts to recursively tag a tag object.
pushAlreadyExists
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” rejects an update that does not qualify for fast-forwarding (e.g., a tag.)
pushFetchFirst
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object we do not have.
pushNeedsForce
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object that is not a commit-ish, or make the remote ref point at an object that is not a commit-ish.
pushNonFFCurrent
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” fails due to a non-fast-forward update to the current branch.
pushNonFFMatching
Shown when the user ran the section called “git-push(1)” and pushed "matching refs" explicitly (i.e. used :, or specified a refspec that isn't the current branch) and it resulted in a non-fast-forward error.
pushRefNeedsUpdate
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” rejects a forced update of a branch when its remote-tracking ref has updates that we do not have locally.
pushUnqualifiedRefname
Shown when the section called “git-push(1)” gives up trying to guess based on the source and destination refs what remote ref namespace the source belongs in, but where we can still suggest that the user push to either refs/heads/* or refs/tags/* based on the type of the source object.
pushUpdateRejected
Set this variable to false if you want to disable pushNonFFCurrent, pushNonFFMatching, pushAlreadyExists, pushFetchFirst, pushNeedsForce, and pushRefNeedsUpdate simultaneously.
rebaseTodoError
Shown when there is an error after editing the rebase todo list.
refSyntax
Shown when the user provides an illegal ref name, to tell the user about the ref syntax documentation.
resetNoRefresh
Shown when the section called “git-reset(1)” takes more than 2 seconds to refresh the index after reset, to tell the user that they can use the --no-refresh option.
resolveConflict
Shown by various commands when conflicts prevent the operation from being performed.
rmHints
Shown on failure in the output of the section called “git-rm(1)”, to give directions on how to proceed from the current state.
sequencerInUse
Shown when a sequencer command is already in progress.
skippedCherryPicks
Shown when the section called “git-rebase(1)” skips a commit that has already been cherry-picked onto the upstream branch.
sparseIndexExpanded
Shown when a sparse index is expanded to a full index, which is likely due to an unexpected set of files existing outside of the sparse-checkout.
statusAheadBehind
Shown when the section called “git-status(1)” computes the ahead/behind counts for a local ref compared to its remote tracking ref, and that calculation takes longer than expected. Will not appear if status.aheadBehind is false or the option --no-ahead-behind is given.
statusHints
Show directions on how to proceed from the current state in the output of the section called “git-status(1)”, in the template shown when writing commit messages in the section called “git-commit(1)”, and in the help message shown by the section called “git-switch(1)” or the section called “git-checkout(1)” when switching branches.
statusUoption
Shown when the section called “git-status(1)” takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate untracked files, to tell the user that they can use the -u option.
submoduleAlternateErrorStrategyDie
Shown when a submodule.alternateErrorStrategy option configured to "die" causes a fatal error.
submoduleMergeConflict
Advice shown when a non-trivial submodule merge conflict is encountered.
submodulesNotUpdated
Shown when a user runs a submodule command that fails because git submodule update --init was not run.
suggestDetachingHead
Shown when the section called “git-switch(1)” refuses to detach HEAD without the explicit --detach option.
updateSparsePath
Shown when either the section called “git-add(1)” or the section called “git-rm(1)” is asked to update index entries outside the current sparse checkout.
waitingForEditor
Shown when Git is waiting for editor input. Relevant when e.g. the editor is not launched inside the terminal.
worktreeAddOrphan
Shown when the user tries to create a worktree from an invalid reference, to tell the user how to create a new unborn branch instead.
alias.*

Command aliases for the the section called “git(1)” command wrapper - e.g. after defining alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD, the invocation git last is equivalent to git cat-file commit HEAD. To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing Git commands are ignored. Arguments are split by spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping are supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.

Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the invocation of git. In particular, this is useful when used with -c to pass in one-time configurations or -p to force pagination. For example, loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase can be defined such that running git loud-rebase would be equivalent to git -c commit.verbose=true rebase. Also, ps = -p status would be a helpful alias since git ps would paginate the output of git status where the original command does not.

If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD, the invocation git new is equivalent to running the shell command gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD. Note:

  • Shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory.
  • GIT_PREFIX is set as returned by running git rev-parse --show-prefix from the original current directory. See the section called “git-rev-parse(1)”.
  • Shell command aliases always receive any extra arguments provided to the Git command-line as positional arguments.

    • Care should be taken if your shell alias is a "one-liner" script with multiple commands (e.g. in a pipeline), references multiple arguments, or is otherwise not able to handle positional arguments added at the end. For example: alias.cmd = "!echo $1 | grep $2" called as git cmd 1 2 will be executed as echo $1 | grep $2 1 2, which is not what you want.
    • A convenient way to deal with this is to write your script operations in an inline function that is then called with any arguments from the command-line. For example `alias.cmd = "!c() { echo $1 | grep $2 ; }; c" will correctly execute the prior example.
    • Setting GIT_TRACE=1 can help you debug the command being run for your alias.
am.keepcr
If true, git-am will call git-mailsplit for patches in mbox format with parameter --keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit will not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving --no-keep-cr from the command line. See the section called “git-am(1)”, the section called “git-mailsplit(1)”.
am.threeWay
By default, git am will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git am to fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally (equivalent to giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to false. See the section called “git-am(1)”.
apply.ignoreWhitespace
When set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false, it tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See the section called “git-apply(1)”.
apply.whitespace
Tells git apply how to handle whitespace, in the same way as the --whitespace option. See the section called “git-apply(1)”.
attr.tree
A reference to a tree in the repository from which to read attributes, instead of the .gitattributes file in the working tree. If the value does not resolve to a valid tree object, an empty tree is used instead. When the GIT_ATTR_SOURCE environment variable or --attr-source command line option are used, this configuration variable has no effect.

Note

The configuration options in bitmapPseudoMerge.* are considered EXPERIMENTAL and may be subject to change or be removed entirely in the future. For more information about the pseudo-merge bitmap feature, see the "Pseudo-merge bitmaps" section of the section called “gitpacking(7)”.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.pattern

Regular expression used to match reference names. Commits pointed to by references matching this pattern (and meeting the below criteria, like bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate and bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold) will be considered for inclusion in a pseudo-merge bitmap.

Commits are grouped into pseudo-merge groups based on whether or not any reference(s) that point at a given commit match the pattern, which is an extended regular expression.

Within a pseudo-merge group, commits may be further grouped into sub-groups based on the capture groups in the pattern. These sub-groupings are formed from the regular expressions by concatenating any capture groups from the regular expression, with a - dash in between.

For example, if the pattern is refs/tags/, then all tags (provided they meet the below criteria) will be considered candidates for the same pseudo-merge group. However, if the pattern is instead refs/remotes/([0-9])+/tags/, then tags from different remotes will be grouped into separate pseudo-merge groups, based on the remote number.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.decay

Determines the rate at which consecutive pseudo-merge bitmap groups decrease in size. Must be non-negative. This parameter can be thought of as k in the function f(n) = C * n^-k, where f(n) is the size of the `n`th group.

Setting the decay rate equal to 0 will cause all groups to be the same size. Setting the decay rate equal to 1 will cause the n`th group to be `1/n the size of the initial group. Higher values of the decay rate cause consecutive groups to shrink at an increasing rate. The default is 1.

If all groups are the same size, it is possible that groups containing newer commits will be able to be used less often than earlier groups, since it is more likely that the references pointing at newer commits will be updated more often than a reference pointing at an old commit.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate
Determines the proportion of non-bitmapped commits (among reference tips) which are selected for inclusion in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. Must be between 0 and 1 (inclusive). The default is 1.
bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold
Determines the minimum age of non-bitmapped commits (among reference tips, as above) which are candidates for inclusion in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 1.week.ago.
bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.maxMerges

Determines the maximum number of pseudo-merge commits among which commits may be distributed.

For pseudo-merge groups whose pattern does not contain any capture groups, this setting is applied for all commits matching the regular expression. For patterns that have one or more capture groups, this setting is applied for each distinct capture group.

For example, if your capture group is refs/tags/, then this setting will distribute all tags into a maximum of maxMerges pseudo-merge commits. However, if your capture group is, say, refs/remotes/([0-9]+)/tags/, then this setting will be applied to each remote's set of tags individually.

Must be non-negative. The default value is 64.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableThreshold

Determines the minimum age of commits (among reference tips, as above, however stable commits are still considered candidates even when they have been covered by a bitmap) which are candidates for a stable a pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 1.month.ago.

Setting this threshold to a smaller value (e.g., 1.week.ago) will cause more stable groups to be generated (which impose a one-time generation cost) but those groups will likely become stale over time. Using a larger value incurs the opposite penalty (fewer stable groups which are more useful).

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableSize
Determines the size (in number of commits) of a stable psuedo-merge bitmap. The default is 512.
blame.blankBoundary
Show blank commit object name for boundary commits in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.coloring
This determines the coloring scheme to be applied to blame output. It can be repeatedLines, highlightRecent, or none which is the default.
blame.date
Specifies the format used to output dates in the section called “git-blame(1)”. If unset the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option at the section called “git-log(1)”.
blame.showEmail
Show the author email instead of author name in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.showRoot
Do not treat root commits as boundaries in the section called “git-blame(1)”. This option defaults to false.
blame.ignoreRevsFile
Ignore revisions listed in the file, one unabbreviated object name per line, in the section called “git-blame(1)”. Whitespace and comments beginning with # are ignored. This option may be repeated multiple times. Empty file names will reset the list of ignored revisions. This option will be handled before the command line option --ignore-revs-file.
blame.markUnblamableLines
Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we could not attribute to another commit with a * in the output of the section called “git-blame(1)”.
blame.markIgnoredLines
Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we attributed to another commit with a ? in the output of the section called “git-blame(1)”.
branch.autoSetupMerge

Tells git branch, git switch and git checkout to set up new branches so that the section called “git-pull(1)” will appropriately merge from the starting point branch. Note that even if this option is not set, this behavior can be chosen per-branch using the --track and --no-track options. This option defaults to true. The valid settings are:

false
no automatic setup is done
true
automatic setup is done when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch
always
automatic setup is done when the starting point is either a local branch or remote-tracking branch
inherit
if the starting point has a tracking configuration, it is copied to the new branch
simple
automatic setup is done only when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch and the new branch has the same name as the remote branch.
branch.autoSetupRebase

When a new branch is created with git branch, git switch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see branch.<name>.rebase). The valid settings are:

never
rebase is never automatically set to true.
local
rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches.
remote
rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches.
always
rebase will be set to true for all tracking branches.

See branch.autoSetupMerge for details on how to set up a branch to track another branch. This option defaults to never.

branch.sort
This variable controls the sort ordering of branches when displayed by the section called “git-branch(1)”. Without the --sort=<value> option provided, the value of this variable will be used as the default. See the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)” field names for valid values.
branch.<name>.remote
When on branch <name>, it tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from or push to. The remote to push to may be overridden with remote.pushDefault (for all branches). The remote to push to, for the current branch, may be further overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote. If no remote is configured, or if you are not on any branch and there is more than one remote defined in the repository, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing. Additionally, . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository), see branch.<name>.merge's final note below.
branch.<name>.pushRemote
When on branch <name>, it overrides branch.<name>.remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch <name>. When you pull from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another place (e.g. your own publishing repository), you would want to set remote.pushDefault to specify the remote to push to for all branches, and use this option to override it for a specific branch.
branch.<name>.merge
Defines, together with branch.<name>.remote, the upstream branch for the given branch. It tells git fetch/git pull/git rebase which branch to merge and can also affect git push (see push.default). When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default refspec to be marked for merging in FETCH_HEAD. The value is handled like the remote part of a refspec, and must match a ref which is fetched from the remote given by branch.<name>.remote. The merge information is used by git pull (which first calls git fetch) to lookup the default branch for merging. Without this option, git pull defaults to merge the first refspec fetched. Specify multiple values to get an octopus merge. If you wish to setup git pull so that it merges into <name> from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch.<name>.merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch.<name>.remote.
branch.<name>.mergeOptions
Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of the section called “git-merge(1)”, but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported.
branch.<name>.rebase

When true, rebase the branch <name> on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when git pull is run. See pull.rebase for doing this in a non branch-specific manner.

When merges (or just m), pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

When the value is interactive (or just i), the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

branch.<name>.description
Branch description, can be edited with git branch --edit-description. Branch description is automatically added to the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary.
browser.<tool>.cmd
Specify the command to invoke the specified browser. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the URLs passed as arguments. (See the section called “git-web--browse(1)”.)
browser.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool that may be used to browse HTML help (see -w option in the section called “git-help(1)”) or a working repository in gitweb (see the section called “git-instaweb(1)”).
bundle.*
The bundle.* keys may appear in a bundle list file found via the git clone --bundle-uri option. These keys currently have no effect if placed in a repository config file, though this will change in the future. See the bundle URI design document for more details.
bundle.version
This integer value advertises the version of the bundle list format used by the bundle list. Currently, the only accepted value is 1.
bundle.mode
This string value should be either all or any. This value describes whether all of the advertised bundles are required to unbundle a complete understanding of the bundled information (all) or if any one of the listed bundle URIs is sufficient (any).
bundle.heuristic
If this string-valued key exists, then the bundle list is designed to work well with incremental git fetch commands. The heuristic signals that there are additional keys available for each bundle that help determine which subset of bundles the client should download. The only value currently understood is creationToken.
bundle.<id>.*
The bundle.<id>.* keys are used to describe a single item in the bundle list, grouped under <id> for identification purposes.
bundle.<id>.uri
This string value defines the URI by which Git can reach the contents of this <id>. This URI may be a bundle file or another bundle list.
checkout.defaultRemote

When you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something> and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/<something>. This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it comes to disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this to origin.

Currently this is used by the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)” when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by the section called “git-worktree(1)” when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like commands or functionality in the future.

checkout.guess
Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. See the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)”.
checkout.workers

The number of parallel workers to use when updating the working tree. The default is one, i.e. sequential execution. If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as the number of logical cores available. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

Note

Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also influence how well the parallel version performs.

checkout.thresholdForParallelism
When running parallel checkout with a small number of files, the cost of subprocess spawning and inter-process communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This setting allows you to define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is 100.
clean.requireForce
A boolean to make git-clean refuse to delete files unless -f is given. Defaults to true.
clone.defaultRemoteName
The name of the remote to create when cloning a repository. Defaults to origin. It can be overridden by passing the --origin command-line option to the section called “git-clone(1)”.
clone.rejectShallow
Reject cloning a repository if it is a shallow one; this can be overridden by passing the --reject-shallow option on the command line. See the section called “git-clone(1)”.
clone.filterSubmodules
If a partial clone filter is provided (see --filter in the section called “git-rev-list(1)”) and --recurse-submodules is used, also apply the filter to submodules.
color.advice
A boolean to enable/disable color in hints (e.g. when a push failed, see advice.* for a list). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.advice.hint
Use customized color for hints.
color.blame.highlightRecent

Specify the line annotation color for git blame --color-by-age depending upon the age of the line.

This setting should be set to a comma-separated list of color and date settings, starting and ending with a color, the dates should be set from oldest to newest. The metadata will be colored with the specified colors if the line was introduced before the given timestamp, overwriting older timestamped colors.

Instead of an absolute timestamp relative timestamps work as well, e.g. 2.weeks.ago is valid to address anything older than 2 weeks.

It defaults to blue,12 month ago,white,1 month ago,red, which colors everything older than one year blue, recent changes between one month and one year old are kept white, and lines introduced within the last month are colored red.

color.blame.repeatedLines
Use the specified color to colorize line annotations for git blame --color-lines, if they come from the same commit as the preceding line. Defaults to cyan.
color.branch
A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of the section called “git-branch(1)”. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.branch.<slot>
Use customized color for branch coloration. <slot> is one of current (the current branch), local (a local branch), remote (a remote-tracking branch in refs/remotes/), upstream (upstream tracking branch), plain (other refs).
color.diff

Whether to use ANSI escape sequences to add color to patches. If this is set to always, the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, and the section called “git-show(1)” will use color for all patches. If it is set to true or auto, those commands will only use color when output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

This does not affect the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or the git-diff-* plumbing commands. Can be overridden on the command line with the --color[=<when>] option.

color.diff.<slot>
Use customized color for diff colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the patch to use the specified color, and is one of context (context text - plain is a historical synonym), meta (metainformation), frag (hunk header), func (function in hunk header), old (removed lines), new (added lines), commit (commit headers), whitespace (highlighting whitespace errors), oldMoved (deleted lines), newMoved (added lines), oldMovedDimmed, oldMovedAlternative, oldMovedAlternativeDimmed, newMovedDimmed, newMovedAlternative newMovedAlternativeDimmed (See the <mode> setting of --color-moved in the section called “git-diff(1)” for details), contextDimmed, oldDimmed, newDimmed, contextBold, oldBold, and newBold (see the section called “git-range-diff(1)” for details).
color.decorate.<slot>
Use customized color for git log --decorate output. <slot> is one of branch, remoteBranch, tag, stash or HEAD for local branches, remote-tracking branches, tags, stash and HEAD, respectively and grafted for grafted commits.
color.grep
When set to always, always highlight matches. When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use color only when the output is written to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.grep.<slot>

Use customized color for grep colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the line to use the specified color, and is one of

context
non-matching text in context lines (when using -A, -B, or -C)
filename
filename prefix (when not using -h)
function
function name lines (when using -p)
lineNumber
line number prefix (when using -n)
column
column number prefix (when using --column)
match
matching text (same as setting matchContext and matchSelected)
matchContext
matching text in context lines
matchSelected
matching text in selected lines. Also, used to customize the following the section called “git-log(1)” subcommands: --grep, --author, and --committer.
selected
non-matching text in selected lines. Also, used to customize the following the section called “git-log(1)” subcommands: --grep, --author and --committer.
separator
separators between fields on a line (:, -, and =) and between hunks (--)
color.interactive
When set to always, always use colors for interactive prompts and displays (such as those used by "git-add --interactive" and "git-clean --interactive"). When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use colors only when the output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.interactive.<slot>
Use customized color for git add --interactive and git clean --interactive output. <slot> may be prompt, header, help or error, for four distinct types of normal output from interactive commands.
color.pager
A boolean to specify whether auto color modes should colorize output going to the pager. Defaults to true; set this to false if your pager does not understand ANSI color codes.
color.push
A boolean to enable/disable color in push errors. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.push.error
Use customized color for push errors.
color.remote
If set, keywords at the start of the line are highlighted. The keywords are "error", "warning", "hint" and "success", and are matched case-insensitively. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true). If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.remote.<slot>
Use customized color for each remote keyword. <slot> may be hint, warning, success or error which match the corresponding keyword.
color.showBranch
A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of the section called “git-show-branch(1)”. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.status
A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of the section called “git-status(1)”. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.status.<slot>
Use customized color for status colorization. <slot> is one of header (the header text of the status message), added or updated (files which are added but not committed), changed (files which are changed but not added in the index), untracked (files which are not tracked by Git), branch (the current branch), nobranch (the color the no branch warning is shown in, defaulting to red), localBranch or remoteBranch (the local and remote branch names, respectively, when branch and tracking information is displayed in the status short-format), or unmerged (files which have unmerged changes).
color.transport
A boolean to enable/disable color when pushes are rejected. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).
color.transport.rejected
Use customized color when a push was rejected.
color.ui
This variable determines the default value for variables such as color.diff and color.grep that control the use of color per command family. Its scope will expand as more commands learn configuration to set a default for the --color option. Set it to false or never if you prefer Git commands not to use color unless enabled explicitly with some other configuration or the --color option. Set it to always if you want all output not intended for machine consumption to use color, to true or auto (this is the default since Git 1.8.4) if you want such output to use color when written to the terminal.
column.ui

Specify whether supported commands should output in columns. This variable consists of a list of tokens separated by spaces or commas:

These options control when the feature should be enabled (defaults to never):

always
always show in columns
never
never show in columns
auto
show in columns if the output is to the terminal

These options control layout (defaults to column). Setting any of these implies always if none of always, never, or auto are specified.

column
fill columns before rows
row
fill rows before columns
plain
show in one column

Finally, these options can be combined with a layout option (defaults to nodense):

dense
make unequal size columns to utilize more space
nodense
make equal size columns
column.branch
Specify whether to output branch listing in git branch in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.clean
Specify the layout when listing items in git clean -i, which always shows files and directories in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.status
Specify whether to output untracked files in git status in columns. See column.ui for details.
column.tag
Specify whether to output tag listings in git tag in columns. See column.ui for details.
commit.cleanup
This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for details. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).
commit.gpgSign
A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.
commit.status
A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.
commit.template
Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.
commit.verbose
A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for details.
commitGraph.generationVersion
Specifies the type of generation number version to use when writing or reading the commit-graph file. If version 1 is specified, then the corrected commit dates will not be written or read. Defaults to 2.
commitGraph.maxNewFilters
Specifies the default value for the --max-new-filters option of git commit-graph write (c.f., the section called “git-commit-graph(1)”).
commitGraph.readChangedPaths
Deprecated. Equivalent to commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=-1 if true, and commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=0 if false. (If commitGraph.changedPathVersion is also set, commitGraph.changedPathsVersion takes precedence.)
commitGraph.changedPathsVersion

Specifies the version of the changed-path Bloom filters that Git will read and write. May be -1, 0, 1, or 2. Note that values greater than 1 may be incompatible with older versions of Git which do not yet understand those versions. Use caution when operating in a mixed-version environment.

Defaults to -1.

If -1, Git will use the version of the changed-path Bloom filters in the repository, defaulting to 1 if there are none.

If 0, Git will not read any Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters when instructed to write.

If 1, Git will only read version 1 Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters.

If 2, Git will only read version 2 Bloom filters, and will write version 2 Bloom filters.

See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)” for more information.

completion.commands
This is only used by git-completion.bash to add or remove commands from the list of completed commands. Normally only porcelain commands and a few select others are completed. You can add more commands, separated by space, in this variable. Prefixing the command with - will remove it from the existing list.
core.fileMode

Tells Git if the executable bit of files in the working tree is to be honored.

Some filesystems lose the executable bit when a file that is marked as executable is checked out, or checks out a non-executable file with executable bit on. the section called “git-clone(1)” or the section called “git-init(1)” probe the filesystem to see if it handles the executable bit correctly and this variable is automatically set as necessary.

A repository, however, may be on a filesystem that handles the filemode correctly, and this variable is set to true when created, but later may be made accessible from another environment that loses the filemode (e.g. exporting ext4 via CIFS mount, visiting a Cygwin created repository with Git for Windows or Eclipse). In such a case it may be necessary to set this variable to false. See the section called “git-update-index(1)”.

The default is true (when core.filemode is not specified in the config file).

core.hideDotFiles
(Windows-only) If true, mark newly-created directories and files whose name starts with a dot as hidden. If dotGitOnly, only the .git/ directory is hidden, but no other files starting with a dot. The default mode is dotGitOnly.
core.ignoreCase

Internal variable which enables various workarounds to enable Git to work better on filesystems that are not case sensitive, like APFS, HFS+, FAT, NTFS, etc. For example, if a directory listing finds "makefile" when Git expects "Makefile", Git will assume it is really the same file, and continue to remember it as "Makefile".

The default is false, except the section called “git-clone(1)” or the section called “git-init(1)” will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

Git relies on the proper configuration of this variable for your operating and file system. Modifying this value may result in unexpected behavior.

core.precomposeUnicode
This option is only used by Mac OS implementation of Git. When core.precomposeUnicode=true, Git reverts the unicode decomposition of filenames done by Mac OS. This is useful when sharing a repository between Mac OS and Linux or Windows. (Git for Windows 1.7.10 or higher is needed, or Git under cygwin 1.7). When false, file names are handled fully transparent by Git, which is backward compatible with older versions of Git.
core.protectHFS
If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would be considered equivalent to .git on an HFS+ filesystem. Defaults to true on Mac OS, and false elsewhere.
core.protectNTFS
If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would cause problems with the NTFS filesystem, e.g. conflict with 8.3 "short" names. Defaults to true on Windows, and false elsewhere.
core.fsmonitor

If set to true, enable the built-in file system monitor daemon for this working directory (the section called “git-fsmonitor--daemon(1)”).

Like hook-based file system monitors, the built-in file system monitor can speed up Git commands that need to refresh the Git index (e.g. git status) in a working directory with many files. The built-in monitor eliminates the need to install and maintain an external third-party tool.

The built-in file system monitor is currently available only on a limited set of supported platforms. Currently, this includes Windows and MacOS.

Otherwise, this variable contains the pathname of the "fsmonitor"
hook command.

This hook command is used to identify all files that may have changed since the requested date/time. This information is used to speed up git by avoiding unnecessary scanning of files that have not changed.

See the "fsmonitor-watchman" section of the section called “githooks(5)”.

Note that if you concurrently use multiple versions of Git, such as one version on the command line and another version in an IDE tool, that the definition of core.fsmonitor was extended to allow boolean values in addition to hook pathnames. Git versions 2.35.1 and prior will not understand the boolean values and will consider the "true" or "false" values as hook pathnames to be invoked. Git versions 2.26 thru 2.35.1 default to hook protocol V2 and will fall back to no fsmonitor (full scan). Git versions prior to 2.26 default to hook protocol V1 and will silently assume there were no changes to report (no scan), so status commands may report incomplete results. For this reason, it is best to upgrade all of your Git versions before using the built-in file system monitor.

core.fsmonitorHookVersion

Sets the protocol version to be used when invoking the "fsmonitor" hook.

There are currently versions 1 and 2. When this is not set, version 2 will be tried first and if it fails then version 1 will be tried. Version 1 uses a timestamp as input to determine which files have changes since that time but some monitors like Watchman have race conditions when used with a timestamp. Version 2 uses an opaque string so that the monitor can return something that can be used to determine what files have changed without race conditions.

core.trustctime
If false, the ctime differences between the index and the working tree are ignored; useful when the inode change time is regularly modified by something outside Git (file system crawlers and some backup systems). See the section called “git-update-index(1)”. True by default.
core.splitIndex
If true, the split-index feature of the index will be used. See the section called “git-update-index(1)”. False by default.
core.untrackedCache
Determines what to do about the untracked cache feature of the index. It will be kept, if this variable is unset or set to keep. It will automatically be added if set to true. And it will automatically be removed, if set to false. Before setting it to true, you should check that mtime is working properly on your system. See the section called “git-update-index(1)”. keep by default, unless feature.manyFiles is enabled which sets this setting to true by default.
core.checkStat

When missing or is set to default, many fields in the stat structure are checked to detect if a file has been modified since Git looked at it. When this configuration variable is set to minimal, sub-second part of mtime and ctime, the uid and gid of the owner of the file, the inode number (and the device number, if Git was compiled to use it), are excluded from the check among these fields, leaving only the whole-second part of mtime (and ctime, if core.trustCtime is set) and the filesize to be checked.

There are implementations of Git that do not leave usable values in some fields (e.g. JGit); by excluding these fields from the comparison, the minimal mode may help interoperability when the same repository is used by these other systems at the same time.

core.quotePath
Commands that output paths (e.g. ls-files, diff), will quote "unusual" characters in the pathname by enclosing the pathname in double-quotes and escaping those characters with backslashes in the same way C escapes control characters (e.g. \t for TAB, \n for LF, \\ for backslash) or bytes with values larger than 0x80 (e.g. octal \302\265 for "micro" in UTF-8). If this variable is set to false, bytes higher than 0x80 are not considered "unusual" any more. Double-quotes, backslash and control characters are always escaped regardless of the setting of this variable. A simple space character is not considered "unusual". Many commands can output pathnames completely verbatim using the -z option. The default value is true.
core.eol
Sets the line ending type to use in the working directory for files that are marked as text (either by having the text attribute set, or by having text=auto and Git auto-detecting the contents as text). Alternatives are lf, crlf and native, which uses the platform's native line ending. The default value is native. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for more information on end-of-line conversion. Note that this value is ignored if core.autocrlf is set to true or input.
core.safecrlf

If true, makes Git check if converting CRLF is reversible when end-of-line conversion is active. Git will verify if a command modifies a file in the work tree either directly or indirectly. For example, committing a file followed by checking out the same file should yield the original file in the work tree. If this is not the case for the current setting of core.autocrlf, Git will reject the file. The variable can be set to "warn", in which case Git will only warn about an irreversible conversion but continue the operation.

CRLF conversion bears a slight chance of corrupting data. When it is enabled, Git will convert CRLF to LF during commit and LF to CRLF during checkout. A file that contains a mixture of LF and CRLF before the commit cannot be recreated by Git. For text files this is the right thing to do: it corrects line endings such that we have only LF line endings in the repository. But for binary files that are accidentally classified as text the conversion can corrupt data.

If you recognize such corruption early you can easily fix it by setting the conversion type explicitly in .gitattributes. Right after committing you still have the original file in your work tree and this file is not yet corrupted. You can explicitly tell Git that this file is binary and Git will handle the file appropriately.

Unfortunately, the desired effect of cleaning up text files with mixed line endings and the undesired effect of corrupting binary files cannot be distinguished. In both cases CRLFs are removed in an irreversible way. For text files this is the right thing to do because CRLFs are line endings, while for binary files converting CRLFs corrupts data.

Note, this safety check does not mean that a checkout will generate a file identical to the original file for a different setting of core.eol and core.autocrlf, but only for the current one. For example, a text file with LF would be accepted with core.eol=lf and could later be checked out with core.eol=crlf, in which case the resulting file would contain CRLF, although the original file contained LF. However, in both work trees the line endings would be consistent, that is either all LF or all CRLF, but never mixed. A file with mixed line endings would be reported by the core.safecrlf mechanism.

core.autocrlf
Setting this variable to "true" is the same as setting the text attribute to "auto" on all files and core.eol to "crlf". Set to true if you want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory and the repository has LF line endings. This variable can be set to input, in which case no output conversion is performed.
core.checkRoundtripEncoding
A comma and/or whitespace separated list of encodings that Git performs UTF-8 round trip checks on if they are used in an working-tree-encoding attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”). The default value is SHIFT-JIS.
core.symlinks

If false, symbolic links are checked out as small plain files that contain the link text. the section called “git-update-index(1)” and the section called “git-add(1)” will not change the recorded type to regular file. Useful on filesystems like FAT that do not support symbolic links.

The default is true, except the section called “git-clone(1)” or the section called “git-init(1)” will probe and set core.symlinks false if appropriate when the repository is created.

core.gitProxy

A "proxy command" to execute (as command host port) instead of establishing direct connection to the remote server when using the Git protocol for fetching. If the variable value is in the "COMMAND for DOMAIN" format, the command is applied only on hostnames ending with the specified domain string. This variable may be set multiple times and is matched in the given order; the first match wins.

Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_COMMAND environment variable (which always applies universally, without the special "for" handling).

The special string none can be used as the proxy command to specify that no proxy be used for a given domain pattern. This is useful for excluding servers inside a firewall from proxy use, while defaulting to a common proxy for external domains.

core.sshCommand
If this variable is set, git fetch and git push will use the specified command instead of ssh when they need to connect to a remote system. The command is in the same form as the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable and is overridden when the environment variable is set.
core.ignoreStat

If true, Git will avoid using lstat() calls to detect if files have changed by setting the "assume-unchanged" bit for those tracked files which it has updated identically in both the index and working tree.

When files are modified outside of Git, the user will need to stage the modified files explicitly (e.g. see Examples section in the section called “git-update-index(1)”). Git will not normally detect changes to those files.

This is useful on systems where lstat() calls are very slow, such as CIFS/Microsoft Windows.

False by default.

core.preferSymlinkRefs
Instead of the default "symref" format for HEAD and other symbolic reference files, use symbolic links. This is sometimes needed to work with old scripts that expect HEAD to be a symbolic link.
core.alternateRefsCommand

When advertising tips of available history from an alternate, use the shell to execute the specified command instead of the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”. The first argument is the absolute path of the alternate. Output must contain one hex object id per line (i.e., the same as produced by git for-each-ref --format='%(objectname)').

Note that you cannot generally put git for-each-ref directly into the config value, as it does not take a repository path as an argument (but you can wrap the command above in a shell script).

core.alternateRefsPrefixes
When listing references from an alternate, list only references that begin with the given prefix. Prefixes match as if they were given as arguments to the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”. To list multiple prefixes, separate them with whitespace. If core.alternateRefsCommand is set, setting core.alternateRefsPrefixes has no effect.
core.bare

If true this repository is assumed to be bare and has no working directory associated with it. If this is the case a number of commands that require a working directory will be disabled, such as the section called “git-add(1)” or the section called “git-merge(1)”.

This setting is automatically guessed by the section called “git-clone(1)” or the section called “git-init(1)” when the repository was created. By default a repository that ends in "/.git" is assumed to be not bare (bare = false), while all other repositories are assumed to be bare (bare = true).

core.worktree

Set the path to the root of the working tree. If GIT_COMMON_DIR environment variable is set, core.worktree is ignored and not used for determining the root of working tree. This can be overridden by the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the --work-tree command-line option. The value can be an absolute path or relative to the path to the .git directory, which is either specified by --git-dir or GIT_DIR, or automatically discovered. If --git-dir or GIT_DIR is specified but none of --work-tree, GIT_WORK_TREE and core.worktree is specified, the current working directory is regarded as the top level of your working tree.

Note that this variable is honored even when set in a configuration file in a ".git" subdirectory of a directory and its value differs from the latter directory (e.g. "/path/to/.git/config" has core.worktree set to "/different/path"), which is most likely a misconfiguration. Running Git commands in the "/path/to" directory will still use "/different/path" as the root of the work tree and can cause confusion unless you know what you are doing (e.g. you are creating a read-only snapshot of the same index to a location different from the repository's usual working tree).

core.logAllRefUpdates

Enable the reflog. Updates to a ref <ref> is logged to the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>", by appending the new and old SHA-1, the date/time and the reason of the update, but only when the file exists. If this configuration variable is set to true, missing "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" file is automatically created for branch heads (i.e. under refs/heads/), remote refs (i.e. under refs/remotes/), note refs (i.e. under refs/notes/), and the symbolic ref HEAD. If it is set to always, then a missing reflog is automatically created for any ref under refs/.

This information can be used to determine what commit was the tip of a branch "2 days ago".

This value is true by default in a repository that has a working directory associated with it, and false by default in a bare repository.

core.repositoryFormatVersion
Internal variable identifying the repository format and layout version. See the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”.
core.sharedRepository
When group (or true), the repository is made shareable between several users in a group (making sure all the files and objects are group-writable). When all (or world or everybody), the repository will be readable by all users, additionally to being group-shareable. When umask (or false), Git will use permissions reported by umask(2). When 0xxx, where 0xxx is an octal number, files in the repository will have this mode value. 0xxx will override user's umask value (whereas the other options will only override requested parts of the user's umask value). Examples: 0660 will make the repo read/write-able for the owner and group, but inaccessible to others (equivalent to group unless umask is e.g. 0022). 0640 is a repository that is group-readable but not group-writable. See the section called “git-init(1)”. False by default.
core.warnAmbiguousRefs
If true, Git will warn you if the ref name you passed it is ambiguous and might match multiple refs in the repository. True by default.
core.compression
An integer -1..9, indicating a default compression level. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If set, this provides a default to other compression variables, such as core.looseCompression and pack.compression.
core.looseCompression
An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects that are not in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to 1 (best speed).
core.packedGitWindowSize

Number of bytes of a pack file to map into memory in a single mapping operation. Larger window sizes may allow your system to process a smaller number of large pack files more quickly. Smaller window sizes will negatively affect performance due to increased calls to the operating system's memory manager, but may improve performance when accessing a large number of large pack files.

Default is 1 MiB if NO_MMAP was set at compile time, otherwise 32 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 1 GiB on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.packedGitLimit

Maximum number of bytes to map simultaneously into memory from pack files. If Git needs to access more than this many bytes at once to complete an operation it will unmap existing regions to reclaim virtual address space within the process.

Default is 256 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 32 TiB (effectively unlimited) on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.deltaBaseCacheLimit

Maximum number of bytes per thread to reserve for caching base objects that may be referenced by multiple deltified objects. By storing the entire decompressed base objects in a cache Git is able to avoid unpacking and decompressing frequently used base objects multiple times.

Default is 96 MiB on all platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.bigFileThreshold

The size of files considered "big", which as discussed below changes the behavior of numerous git commands, as well as how such files are stored within the repository. The default is 512 MiB. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

Files above the configured limit will be:

core.excludesFile
Specifies the pathname to the file that contains patterns to describe paths that are not meant to be tracked, in addition to .gitignore (per-directory) and .git/info/exclude. Defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead. See the section called “gitignore(5)”.
core.askPass
Some commands (e.g. svn and http interfaces) that interactively ask for a password can be told to use an external program given via the value of this variable. Can be overridden by the GIT_ASKPASS environment variable. If not set, fall back to the value of the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable or, failing that, a simple password prompt. The external program shall be given a suitable prompt as command-line argument and write the password on its STDOUT.
core.attributesFile
In addition to .gitattributes (per-directory) and .git/info/attributes, Git looks into this file for attributes (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”). Path expansions are made the same way as for core.excludesFile. Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/attributes. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/attributes is used instead.
core.hooksPath

By default Git will look for your hooks in the $GIT_DIR/hooks directory. Set this to different path, e.g. /etc/git/hooks, and Git will try to find your hooks in that directory, e.g. /etc/git/hooks/pre-receive instead of in $GIT_DIR/hooks/pre-receive.

The path can be either absolute or relative. A relative path is taken as relative to the directory where the hooks are run (see the "DESCRIPTION" section of the section called “githooks(5)”).

This configuration variable is useful in cases where you'd like to centrally configure your Git hooks instead of configuring them on a per-repository basis, or as a more flexible and centralized alternative to having an init.templateDir where you've changed default hooks.

You can also disable all hooks entirely by setting core.hooksPath to /dev/null. This is usually only advisable for expert users and on a per-command basis using configuration parameters of the form git -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null ....

core.editor
Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages by launching an editor use the value of this variable when it is set, and the environment variable GIT_EDITOR is not set. See the section called “git-var(1)”.
core.commentChar , core.commentString

Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages consider a line that begins with this character commented, and removes them after the editor returns (default #).

If set to "auto", git-commit would select a character that is not the beginning character of any line in existing commit messages.

Note that these two variables are aliases of each other, and in modern versions of Git you are free to use a string (e.g., // or ⁑⁕⁑) with commentChar. Versions of Git prior to v2.45.0 will ignore commentString but will reject a value of commentChar that consists of more than a single ASCII byte. If you plan to use your config with older and newer versions of Git, you may want to specify both:

[core]
# single character for older versions
commentChar = "#"
# string for newer versions (which will override commentChar
# because it comes later in the file)
commentString = "//"
core.filesRefLockTimeout
The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock an individual reference. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 100 (i.e., retry for 100ms).
core.packedRefsTimeout
The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock the packed-refs file. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1 second).
core.pager

Text viewer for use by Git commands (e.g., less). The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell. The order of preference is the $GIT_PAGER environment variable, then core.pager configuration, then $PAGER, and then the default chosen at compile time (usually less).

When the LESS environment variable is unset, Git sets it to FRX (if LESS environment variable is set, Git does not change it at all). If you want to selectively override Git's default setting for LESS, you can set core.pager to e.g. less -S. This will be passed to the shell by Git, which will translate the final command to LESS=FRX less -S. The environment does not set the S option but the command line does, instructing less to truncate long lines. Similarly, setting core.pager to less -+F will deactivate the F option specified by the environment from the command-line, deactivating the "quit if one screen" behavior of less. One can specifically activate some flags for particular commands: for example, setting pager.blame to less -S enables line truncation only for git blame.

Likewise, when the LV environment variable is unset, Git sets it to -c. You can override this setting by exporting LV with another value or setting core.pager to lv +c.

core.whitespace

A comma separated list of common whitespace problems to notice. git diff will use color.diff.whitespace to highlight them, and git apply --whitespace=error will consider them as errors. You can prefix - to disable any of them (e.g. -trailing-space):

  • blank-at-eol treats trailing whitespaces at the end of the line as an error (enabled by default).
  • space-before-tab treats a space character that appears immediately before a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (enabled by default).
  • indent-with-non-tab treats a line that is indented with space characters instead of the equivalent tabs as an error (not enabled by default).
  • tab-in-indent treats a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (not enabled by default).
  • blank-at-eof treats blank lines added at the end of file as an error (enabled by default).
  • trailing-space is a short-hand to cover both blank-at-eol and blank-at-eof.
  • cr-at-eol treats a carriage-return at the end of line as part of the line terminator, i.e. with it, trailing-space does not trigger if the character before such a carriage-return is not a whitespace (not enabled by default).
  • tabwidth=<n> tells how many character positions a tab occupies; this is relevant for indent-with-non-tab and when Git fixes tab-in-indent errors. The default tab width is 8. Allowed values are 1 to 63.
core.fsync

A comma-separated list of components of the repository that should be hardened via the core.fsyncMethod when created or modified. You can disable hardening of any component by prefixing it with a -. Items that are not hardened may be lost in the event of an unclean system shutdown. Unless you have special requirements, it is recommended that you leave this option empty or pick one of committed, added, or all.

When this configuration is encountered, the set of components starts with the platform default value, disabled components are removed, and additional components are added. none resets the state so that the platform default is ignored.

The empty string resets the fsync configuration to the platform default. The default on most platforms is equivalent to core.fsync=committed,-loose-object, which has good performance, but risks losing recent work in the event of an unclean system shutdown.

  • none clears the set of fsynced components.
  • loose-object hardens objects added to the repo in loose-object form.
  • pack hardens objects added to the repo in packfile form.
  • pack-metadata hardens packfile bitmaps and indexes.
  • commit-graph hardens the commit-graph file.
  • index hardens the index when it is modified.
  • objects is an aggregate option that is equivalent to loose-object,pack.
  • reference hardens references modified in the repo.
  • derived-metadata is an aggregate option that is equivalent to pack-metadata,commit-graph.
  • committed is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to objects. This mode sacrifices some performance to ensure that work that is committed to the repository with git commit or similar commands is hardened.
  • added is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to committed,index. This mode sacrifices additional performance to ensure that the results of commands like git add and similar operations are hardened.
  • all is an aggregate option that syncs all individual components above.
core.fsyncMethod

A value indicating the strategy Git will use to harden repository data using fsync and related primitives.

  • fsync uses the fsync() system call or platform equivalents.
  • writeout-only issues pagecache writeback requests, but depending on the filesystem and storage hardware, data added to the repository may not be durable in the event of a system crash. This is the default mode on macOS.
  • batch enables a mode that uses writeout-only flushes to stage multiple updates in the disk writeback cache and then does a single full fsync of a dummy file to trigger the disk cache flush at the end of the operation.

    Currently batch mode only applies to loose-object files. Other repository data is made durable as if fsync was specified. This mode is expected to be as safe as fsync on macOS for repos stored on HFS+ or APFS filesystems and on Windows for repos stored on NTFS or ReFS filesystems.

core.fsyncObjectFiles

This boolean will enable fsync() when writing object files. This setting is deprecated. Use core.fsync instead.

This setting affects data added to the Git repository in loose-object form. When set to true, Git will issue an fsync or similar system call to flush caches so that loose-objects remain consistent in the face of a unclean system shutdown.

core.preloadIndex

Enable parallel index preload for operations like git diff

This can speed up operations like git diff and git status especially on filesystems like NFS that have weak caching semantics and thus relatively high IO latencies. When enabled, Git will do the index comparison to the filesystem data in parallel, allowing overlapping IO's. Defaults to true.

core.unsetenvvars
Windows-only: comma-separated list of environment variables' names that need to be unset before spawning any other process. Defaults to PERL5LIB to account for the fact that Git for Windows insists on using its own Perl interpreter.
core.restrictinheritedhandles
Windows-only: override whether spawned processes inherit only standard file handles (stdin, stdout and stderr) or all handles. Can be auto, true or false. Defaults to auto, which means true on Windows 7 and later, and false on older Windows versions.
core.createObject

You can set this to link, in which case a hardlink followed by a delete of the source are used to make sure that object creation will not overwrite existing objects.

On some file system/operating system combinations, this is unreliable. Set this config setting to rename there; however, this will remove the check that makes sure that existing object files will not get overwritten.

core.notesRef

When showing commit messages, also show notes which are stored in the given ref. The ref must be fully qualified. If the given ref does not exist, it is not an error but means that no notes should be printed.

This setting defaults to "refs/notes/commits", and it can be overridden by the GIT_NOTES_REF environment variable. See the section called “git-notes(1)”.

core.commitGraph
If true, then git will read the commit-graph file (if it exists) to parse the graph structure of commits. Defaults to true. See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)” for more information.
core.useReplaceRefs
If set to false, behave as if the --no-replace-objects option was given on the command line. See the section called “git(1)” and the section called “git-replace(1)” for more information.
core.multiPackIndex
Use the multi-pack-index file to track multiple packfiles using a single index. See the section called “git-multi-pack-index(1)” for more information. Defaults to true.
core.sparseCheckout
Enable "sparse checkout" feature. See the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more information.
core.sparseCheckoutCone
Enables the "cone mode" of the sparse checkout feature. When the sparse-checkout file contains a limited set of patterns, this mode provides significant performance advantages. The "non-cone mode" can be requested to allow specifying more flexible patterns by setting this variable to false. See the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more information.
core.abbrev
Set the length object names are abbreviated to. If unspecified or set to "auto", an appropriate value is computed based on the approximate number of packed objects in your repository, which hopefully is enough for abbreviated object names to stay unique for some time. If set to "no", no abbreviation is made and the object names are shown in their full length. The minimum length is 4.
core.maxTreeDepth
The maximum depth Git is willing to recurse while traversing a tree (e.g., "a/b/cde/f" has a depth of 4). This is a fail-safe to allow Git to abort cleanly, and should not generally need to be adjusted. When Git is compiled with MSVC, the default is 512. Otherwise, the default is 2048.
credential.helper

Specify an external helper to be called when a username or password credential is needed; the helper may consult external storage to avoid prompting the user for the credentials. This is normally the name of a credential helper with possible arguments, but may also be an absolute path with arguments or, if preceded by !, shell commands.

Note that multiple helpers may be defined. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for details and examples.

credential.interactive
By default, Git and any configured credential helpers will ask for user input when new credentials are required. Many of these helpers will succeed based on stored credentials if those credentials are still valid. To avoid the possibility of user interactivity from Git, set credential.interactive=false. Some credential helpers respect this option as well.
credential.useHttpPath
When acquiring credentials, consider the "path" component of an http or https URL to be important. Defaults to false. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for more information.
credential.sanitizePrompt
By default, user names and hosts that are shown as part of the password prompt are not allowed to contain control characters (they will be URL-encoded by default). Configure this setting to false to override that behavior.
credential.protectProtocol
By default, Carriage Return characters are not allowed in the protocol that is used when Git talks to a credential helper. This setting allows users to override this default.
credential.username
If no username is set for a network authentication, use this username by default. See credential.<context>.* below, and the section called “gitcredentials(7)”.
credential.<url>.*
Any of the credential.* options above can be applied selectively to some credentials. For example, "credential.https://example.com.username" would set the default username only for https connections to example.com. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for details on how URLs are matched.
credentialCache.ignoreSIGHUP
Tell git-credential-cache--daemon to ignore SIGHUP, instead of quitting.
credentialStore.lockTimeoutMS
The length of time, in milliseconds, for git-credential-store to retry when trying to lock the credentials file. A value of 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1s).
diff.autoRefreshIndex
When using git diff to compare with work tree files, do not consider stat-only changes as changed. Instead, silently run git update-index --refresh to update the cached stat information for paths whose contents in the work tree match the contents in the index. This option defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files.
diff.dirstat

A comma separated list of --dirstat parameters specifying the default behavior of the --dirstat option to the section called “git-diff(1)” and friends. The defaults can be overridden on the command line (using --dirstat=<param>,...). The fallback defaults (when not changed by diff.dirstat) are changes,noncumulative,3. The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: files,10,cumulative.

diff.statNameWidth
Limit the width of the filename part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.
diff.statGraphWidth
Limit the width of the graph part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.
diff.context
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the default of 3. This value is overridden by the -U option.
diff.interHunkContext
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing the hunks that are close to each other. This value serves as the default for the --inter-hunk-context command line option.
diff.external
If this config variable is set, diff generation is not performed using the internal diff machinery, but using the given command. Can be overridden with the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable. The command is called with parameters as described under "git Diffs" in the section called “git(1)”. Note: if you want to use an external diff program only on a subset of your files, you might want to use the section called “gitattributes(5)” instead.
diff.trustExitCode
If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.external command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.
diff.ignoreSubmodules
Sets the default value of --ignore-submodules. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files. git checkout and git switch also honor this setting when reporting uncommitted changes. Setting it to all disables the submodule summary normally shown by git commit and git status when status.submoduleSummary is set unless it is overridden by using the --ignore-submodules command-line option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting. By default this is set to untracked so that any untracked submodules are ignored.
diff.mnemonicPrefix

If set, git diff uses a prefix pair that is different from the standard a/ and b/ depending on what is being compared. When this configuration is in effect, reverse diff output also swaps the order of the prefixes:

git diff
compares the (i)ndex and the (w)ork tree;
git diff HEAD
compares a (c)ommit and the (w)ork tree;
git diff --cached
compares a (c)ommit and the (i)ndex;
git diff HEAD:<file1> <file2>
compares an (o)bject and a (w)ork tree entity;
git diff --no-index <a> <b>
compares two non-git things <a> and <b>.
diff.noPrefix
If set, git diff does not show any source or destination prefix.
diff.srcPrefix
If set, git diff uses this source prefix. Defaults to a/.
diff.dstPrefix
If set, git diff uses this destination prefix. Defaults to b/.
diff.relative
If set to true, git diff does not show changes outside of the directory and show pathnames relative to the current directory.
diff.orderFile
File indicating how to order files within a diff. See the -O option to the section called “git-diff(1)” for details. If diff.orderFile is a relative pathname, it is treated as relative to the top of the working tree.
diff.renameLimit
The number of files to consider in the exhaustive portion of copy/rename detection; equivalent to the git diff option -l. If not set, the default value is currently 1000. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.
diff.renames
Whether and how Git detects renames. If set to false, rename detection is disabled. If set to true, basic rename detection is enabled. If set to copies or copy, Git will detect copies, as well. Defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain like the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, and not lower level commands such as the section called “git-diff-files(1)”.
diff.suppressBlankEmpty
A boolean to inhibit the standard behavior of printing a space before each empty output line. Defaults to false.
diff.submodule
Specify the format in which differences in submodules are shown. The short format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. The log format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. The diff format shows an inline diff of the changed contents of the submodule. Defaults to short.
diff.wordRegex
A POSIX Extended Regular Expression used to determine what is a "word" when performing word-by-word difference calculations. Character sequences that match the regular expression are "words", all other characters are ignorable whitespace.
diff.<driver>.command
The custom diff driver command. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.trustExitCode
If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.<driver>.command command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.
diff.<driver>.xfuncname
The regular expression that the diff driver should use to recognize the hunk header. A built-in pattern may also be used. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.binary
Set this option to true to make the diff driver treat files as binary. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.textconv
The command that the diff driver should call to generate the text-converted version of a file. The result of the conversion is used to generate a human-readable diff. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.wordRegex
The regular expression that the diff driver should use to split words in a line. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.cachetextconv
Set this option to true to make the diff driver cache the text conversion outputs. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.indentHeuristic
Set this option to false to disable the default heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.
diff.algorithm

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".
diff.wsErrorHighlight
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace. The command line option --ws-error-highlight=<kind> overrides this setting.
diff.colorMoved
If set to either a valid <mode> or a true value, moved lines in a diff are colored differently. For details of valid modes see --color-moved in the section called “git-diff(1)”. If simply set to true the default color mode will be used. When set to false, moved lines are not colored.
diff.colorMovedWS
When moved lines are colored using e.g. the diff.colorMoved setting, this option controls the mode how spaces are treated. For details of valid modes see --color-moved-ws in the section called “git-diff(1)”.
diff.tool
Controls which diff tool is used by the section called “git-difftool(1)”. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.tool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.
diff.guitool

Controls which diff tool is used by the section called “git-difftool(1)” when the -g/--gui flag is specified. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.guitool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
Use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
bc
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc3
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc4
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
codecompare
Use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
deltawalker
Use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
diffmerge
Use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
diffuse
Use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
ecmerge
Use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
emerge
Use Emacs' Emerge
examdiff
Use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
guiffy
Use Guiffy's Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
gvimdiff
Use gVim (requires a graphical session)
kdiff3
Use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
kompare
Use Kompare (requires a graphical session)
meld
Use Meld (requires a graphical session)
nvimdiff
Use Neovim
opendiff
Use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
p4merge
Use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
smerge
Use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
tkdiff
Use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
vimdiff
Use Vim
vscode
Use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
winmerge
Use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
xxdiff
Use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
difftool.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified diff tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image.

See the --tool=<tool> option in the section called “git-difftool(1)” for more details.

difftool.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH.
difftool.trustExitCode

Exit difftool if the invoked diff tool returns a non-zero exit status.

See the --trust-exit-code option in the section called “git-difftool(1)” for more details.

difftool.prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.
difftool.guiDefault
Set true to use the diff.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select diff.guitool or diff.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the diff.guitool to be used.
extensions.*

Unless otherwise stated, is an error to specify an extension if core.repositoryFormatVersion is not 1. See the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”.

compatObjectFormat
Specify a compatibility hash algorithm to use. The acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. The value specified must be different from the value of extensions.objectFormat. This allows client level interoperability between git repositories whose objectFormat matches this compatObjectFormat. In particular when fully implemented the pushes and pulls from a repository in whose objectFormat matches compatObjectFormat. As well as being able to use oids encoded in compatObjectFormat in addition to oids encoded with objectFormat to locally specify objects.
noop

This extension does not change git's behavior at all. It is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

noop-v1
This extension does not change git's behavior at all. It is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility.
objectFormat

Specify the hash algorithm to use. The acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. If not specified, sha1 is assumed.

Note that this setting should only be set by the section called “git-init(1)” or the section called “git-clone(1)”. Trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues.

partialClone

When enabled, indicates that the repo was created with a partial clone (or later performed a partial fetch) and that the remote may have omitted sending certain unwanted objects. Such a remote is called a "promisor remote" and it promises that all such omitted objects can be fetched from it in the future.

The value of this key is the name of the promisor remote.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

preciousObjects

If enabled, indicates that objects in the repository MUST NOT be deleted (e.g., by git-prune or git repack -d).

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

refStorage

Specify the ref storage format to use. The acceptable values are:

  • files for loose files with packed-refs. This is the default.
  • reftable for the reftable format. This format is experimental and its internals are subject to change.

Note that this setting should only be set by the section called “git-init(1)” or the section called “git-clone(1)”. Trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues.

relativeWorktrees
If enabled, indicates at least one worktree has been linked with relative paths. Automatically set if a worktree has been created or repaired with either the --relative-paths option or with the worktree.useRelativePaths config set to true.
worktreeConfig

If enabled, then worktrees will load config settings from the $GIT_DIR/config.worktree file in addition to the $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config file. Note that $GIT_COMMON_DIR and $GIT_DIR are the same for the main working tree, while other working trees have $GIT_DIR equal to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/<id>/. The settings in the config.worktree file will override settings from any other config files.

When enabling this extension, you must be careful to move certain values from the common config file to the main working tree's config.worktree file, if present:

  • core.worktree must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.
  • If core.bare is true, then it must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.

It may also be beneficial to adjust the locations of core.sparseCheckout and core.sparseCheckoutCone depending on your desire for customizable sparse-checkout settings for each worktree. By default, the git sparse-checkout builtin enables this extension, assigns these config values on a per-worktree basis, and uses the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file to specify the sparsity for each worktree independently. See the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more details.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

fastimport.unpackLimit
If the number of objects imported by the section called “git-fast-import(1)” is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However, if the number of imported objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the pack will be stored as a pack. Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.
feature.*
The config settings that start with feature. modify the defaults of a group of other config settings. These groups are created by the Git developer community as recommended defaults and are subject to change. In particular, new config options may be added with different defaults.
feature.experimental

Enable config options that are new to Git, and are being considered for future defaults. Config settings included here may be added or removed with each release, including minor version updates. These settings may have unintended interactions since they are so new. Please enable this setting if you are interested in providing feedback on experimental features. The new default values are:

  • fetch.negotiationAlgorithm=skipping may improve fetch negotiation times by skipping more commits at a time, reducing the number of round trips.
  • pack.useBitmapBoundaryTraversal=true may improve bitmap traversal times by walking fewer objects.
  • pack.allowPackReuse=multi may improve the time it takes to create a pack by reusing objects from multiple packs instead of just one.
feature.manyFiles

Enable config options that optimize for repos with many files in the working directory. With many files, commands such as git status and git checkout may be slow and these new defaults improve performance:

  • index.skipHash=true speeds up index writes by not computing a trailing checksum. Note that this will cause Git versions earlier than 2.13.0 to refuse to parse the index and Git versions earlier than 2.40.0 will report a corrupted index during git fsck.
  • index.version=4 enables path-prefix compression in the index.
  • core.untrackedCache=true enables the untracked cache. This setting assumes that mtime is working on your machine.
fetch.recurseSubmodules
This option controls whether git fetch (and the underlying fetch in git pull) will recursively fetch into populated submodules. This option can be set either to a boolean value or to on-demand. Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to recurse unconditionally into submodules when set to true or to not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand, fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule's reference. Defaults to on-demand, or to the value of submodule.recurse if set.
fetch.fsckObjects
If it is set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.
fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.
fetch.fsck.skipList
Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.
fetch.unpackLimit
If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.
fetch.prune
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
fetch.pruneTags
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* refspec was provided when pruning, if not set already. This allows for setting both this option and fetch.prune to maintain a 1=1 mapping to upstream refs. See also remote.<name>.pruneTags and the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
fetch.all
If true, fetch will attempt to update all available remotes. This behavior can be overridden by passing --no-all or by explicitly specifying one or more remote(s) to fetch from. Defaults to false.
fetch.output
Control how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full and compact. Default value is full. See the OUTPUT section in the section called “git-fetch(1)” for details.
fetch.negotiationAlgorithm

Control how information about the commits in the local repository is sent when negotiating the contents of the packfile to be sent by the server. Set to "consecutive" to use an algorithm that walks over consecutive commits checking each one. Set to "skipping" to use an algorithm that skips commits in an effort to converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary packfile; or set to "noop" to not send any information at all, which will almost certainly result in a larger-than-necessary packfile, but will skip the negotiation step. Set to "default" to override settings made previously and use the default behaviour. The default is normally "consecutive", but if feature.experimental is true, then the default is "skipping". Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out.

See also the --negotiate-only and --negotiation-tip options to the section called “git-fetch(1)”.

fetch.showForcedUpdates
Set to false to enable --no-show-forced-updates in the section called “git-fetch(1)” and the section called “git-pull(1)” commands. Defaults to true.
fetch.parallel

Specifies the maximal number of fetch operations to be run in parallel at a time (submodules, or remotes when the --multiple option of the section called “git-fetch(1)” is in effect).

A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.

For submodules, this setting can be overridden using the submodule.fetchJobs config setting.

fetch.writeCommitGraph
Set to true to write a commit-graph after every git fetch command that downloads a pack-file from a remote. Using the --split option, most executions will create a very small commit-graph file on top of the existing commit-graph file(s). Occasionally, these files will merge and the write may take longer. Having an updated commit-graph file helps performance of many Git commands, including git merge-base, git push -f, and git log --graph. Defaults to false.
fetch.bundleURI

This value stores a URI for downloading Git object data from a bundle URI before performing an incremental fetch from the origin Git server. This is similar to how the --bundle-uri option behaves in the section called “git-clone(1)”. git clone --bundle-uri will set the fetch.bundleURI value if the supplied bundle URI contains a bundle list that is organized for incremental fetches.

If you modify this value and your repository has a fetch.bundleCreationToken value, then remove that fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching from the new bundle URI.

fetch.bundleCreationToken

When using fetch.bundleURI to fetch incrementally from a bundle list that uses the "creationToken" heuristic, this config value stores the maximum creationToken value of the downloaded bundles. This value is used to prevent downloading bundles in the future if the advertised creationToken is not strictly larger than this value.

The creation token values are chosen by the provider serving the specific bundle URI. If you modify the URI at fetch.bundleURI, then be sure to remove the value for the fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching.

filter.<driver>.clean
The command which is used to convert the content of a worktree file to a blob upon checkin. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
filter.<driver>.smudge
The command which is used to convert the content of a blob object to a worktree file upon checkout. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
format.attach
Enable multipart/mixed attachments as the default for format-patch. The value can also be a double quoted string which will enable attachments as the default and set the value as the boundary. See the --attach option in the section called “git-format-patch(1)”. To countermand an earlier value, set it to an empty string.
format.from
Provides the default value for the --from option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a name and email address. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-from, using commit authors directly in the "From:" field of patch mails. If true, format-patch defaults to --from, using your committer identity in the "From:" field of patch mails and including a "From:" field in the body of the patch mail if different. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch uses that value instead of your committer identity. Defaults to false.
format.forceInBodyFrom
Provides the default value for the --[no-]force-in-body-from option to format-patch. Defaults to false.
format.numbered
A boolean which can enable or disable sequence numbers in patch subjects. It defaults to "auto" which enables it only if there is more than one patch. It can be enabled or disabled for all messages by setting it to "true" or "false". See --numbered option in the section called “git-format-patch(1)”.
format.headers
Additional email headers to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See the section called “git-format-patch(1)”.
format.to , format.cc
Additional recipients to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See the --to and --cc options in the section called “git-format-patch(1)”.
format.subjectPrefix
The default for format-patch is to output files with the [PATCH] subject prefix. Use this variable to change that prefix.
format.coverFromDescription
The default mode for format-patch to determine which parts of the cover letter will be populated using the branch's description. See the --cover-from-description option in the section called “git-format-patch(1)”.
format.signature
The default for format-patch is to output a signature containing the Git version number. Use this variable to change that default. Set this variable to the empty string ("") to suppress signature generation.
format.signatureFile
Works just like format.signature except the contents of the file specified by this variable will be used as the signature.
format.suffix
The default for format-patch is to output files with the suffix .patch. Use this variable to change that suffix (make sure to include the dot if you want it).
format.encodeEmailHeaders
Encode email headers that have non-ASCII characters with "Q-encoding" (described in RFC 2047) for email transmission. Defaults to true.
format.pretty
The default pretty format for log/show/whatchanged command. See the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-whatchanged(1)”.
format.thread
The default threading style for git format-patch. Can be a boolean value, or shallow or deep. shallow threading makes every mail a reply to the head of the series, where the head is chosen from the cover letter, the --in-reply-to, and the first patch mail, in this order. deep threading makes every mail a reply to the previous one. A true boolean value is the same as shallow, and a false value disables threading.
format.signOff
A boolean value which lets you enable the -s/--signoff option of format-patch by default. Note: Adding the Signed-off-by trailer to a patch should be a conscious act and means that you certify you have the rights to submit this work under the same open source license. Please see the SubmittingPatches document for further discussion.
format.coverLetter
A boolean that controls whether to generate a cover-letter when format-patch is invoked, but in addition can be set to "auto", to generate a cover-letter only when there's more than one patch. Default is false.
format.outputDirectory
Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the current working directory. All directory components will be created.
format.filenameMaxLength
The maximum length of the output filenames generated by the format-patch command; defaults to 64. Can be overridden by the --filename-max-length=<n> command line option.
format.useAutoBase
A boolean value which lets you enable the --base=auto option of format-patch by default. Can also be set to "whenAble" to allow enabling --base=auto if a suitable base is available, but to skip adding base info otherwise without the format dying.
format.notes

Provides the default value for the --notes option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a ref which specifies where to get notes. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-notes. If true, format-patch defaults to --notes. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch defaults to --notes=<ref>, where ref is the non-boolean value. Defaults to false.

If one wishes to use the ref refs/notes/true, please use that literal instead.

This configuration can be specified multiple times in order to allow multiple notes refs to be included. In that case, it will behave similarly to multiple --[no-]notes[=] options passed in. That is, a value of true will show the default notes, a value of <ref> will also show notes from that notes ref and a value of false will negate previous configurations and not show notes.

For example,

[format]
        notes = true
        notes = foo
        notes = false
        notes = bar

will only show notes from refs/notes/bar.

format.mboxrd
A boolean value which enables the robust "mboxrd" format when --stdout is in use to escape "^>+From " lines.
format.noprefix
If set, do not show any source or destination prefix in patches. This is equivalent to the diff.noprefix option used by git diff (but which is not respected by format-patch). Note that by setting this, the receiver of any patches you generate will have to apply them using the -p0 option.
fsck.<msg-id>

During fsck git may find issues with legacy data which wouldn't be generated by current versions of git, and which wouldn't be sent over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set. This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories containing such data.

Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by the section called “git-fsck(1)”, but to accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead, or to clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>.

The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but the same applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and fetch.fsck.*. variables.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor, the receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> variables will not fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration if they aren't set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.

In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go unnoticed.

Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> will only cause git to warn.

See the Fsck Messages section of the section called “git-fsck(1)” for supported values of <msg-id>.

fsck.skipList

The path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later, comments (#), empty lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace are ignored. Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.

This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored, such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this setting.

Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren't set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement; the object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list. After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so there's now no reason to pre-sort the list.

fsmonitor.allowRemote
By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with network-mounted repositories. Setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to true overrides this behavior. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.
fsmonitor.socketDir
This Mac OS-specific option, if set, specifies the directory in which to create the Unix domain socket used for communication between the fsmonitor daemon and various Git commands. The directory must reside on a native Mac OS filesystem. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.
gc.aggressiveDepth

The depth parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 50, which is the default for the --depth option when --aggressive isn't in use.

See the documentation for the --depth option in the section called “git-repack(1)” for more details.

gc.aggressiveWindow

The window size parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 250, which is a much more aggressive window size than the default --window of 10.

See the documentation for the --window option in the section called “git-repack(1)” for more details.

gc.auto

When there are approximately more than this many loose objects in the repository, git gc --auto will pack them. Some Porcelain commands use this command to perform a light-weight garbage collection from time to time. The default value is 6700.

Setting this to 0 disables not only automatic packing based on the number of loose objects, but also any other heuristic git gc --auto will otherwise use to determine if there's work to do, such as gc.autoPackLimit.

gc.autoPackLimit

When there are more than this many packs that are not marked with *.keep file in the repository, git gc --auto consolidates them into one larger pack. The default value is 50. Setting this to 0 disables it. Setting gc.auto to 0 will also disable this.

See the gc.bigPackThreshold configuration variable below. When in use, it'll affect how the auto pack limit works.

gc.autoDetach
Make git gc --auto return immediately and run in the background if the system supports it. Default is true. This config variable acts as a fallback in case maintenance.autoDetach is not set.
gc.bigPackThreshold

If non-zero, all non-cruft packs larger than this limit are kept when git gc is run. This is very similar to --keep-largest-pack except that all non-cruft packs that meet the threshold are kept, not just the largest pack. Defaults to zero. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

Note that if the number of kept packs is more than gc.autoPackLimit, this configuration variable is ignored, all packs except the base pack will be repacked. After this the number of packs should go below gc.autoPackLimit and gc.bigPackThreshold should be respected again.

If the amount of memory estimated for git repack to run smoothly is not available and gc.bigPackThreshold is not set, the largest pack will also be excluded (this is the equivalent of running git gc with --keep-largest-pack).

gc.writeCommitGraph
If true, then gc will rewrite the commit-graph file when the section called “git-gc(1)” is run. When using git gc --auto the commit-graph will be updated if housekeeping is required. Default is true. See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)” for details.
gc.logExpiry
If the file gc.log exists, then git gc --auto will print its content and exit with status zero instead of running unless that file is more than gc.logExpiry old. Default is "1.day". See gc.pruneExpire for more ways to specify its value.
gc.packRefs
Running git pack-refs in a repository renders it unclonable by Git versions prior to 1.5.1.2 over dumb transports such as HTTP. This variable determines whether git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set to notbare to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. The default is true.
gc.cruftPacks
Store unreachable objects in a cruft pack (see the section called “git-repack(1)”) instead of as loose objects. The default is true.
gc.maxCruftSize
Limit the size of new cruft packs when repacking. When specified in addition to --max-cruft-size, the command line option takes priority. See the --max-cruft-size option of the section called “git-repack(1)”.
gc.pruneExpire
When git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago (and repack --cruft --cruft-expiration 2.weeks.ago if using cruft packs via gc.cruftPacks or --cruft). Override the grace period with this config variable. The value "now" may be used to disable this grace period and always prune unreachable objects immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. This feature helps prevent corruption when git gc runs concurrently with another process writing to the repository; see the "NOTES" section of the section called “git-gc(1)”.
gc.worktreePruneExpire
When git gc is run, it calls git worktree prune --expire 3.months.ago. This config variable can be used to set a different grace period. The value "now" may be used to disable the grace period and prune $GIT_DIR/worktrees immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning.
gc.reflogExpire , gc.<pattern>.reflogExpire
git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.
gc.reflogExpireUnreachable , gc.<pattern>.reflogExpireUnreachable

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

These types of entries are generally created as a result of using git commit --amend or git rebase and are the commits prior to the amend or rebase occurring. Since these changes are not part of the current project most users will want to expire them sooner, which is why the default is more aggressive than gc.reflogExpire.

gc.recentObjectsHook

When considering whether or not to remove an object (either when generating a cruft pack or storing unreachable objects as loose), use the shell to execute the specified command(s). Interpret their output as object IDs which Git will consider as "recent", regardless of their age. By treating their mtimes as "now", any objects (and their descendants) mentioned in the output will be kept regardless of their true age.

Output must contain exactly one hex object ID per line, and nothing else. Objects which cannot be found in the repository are ignored. Multiple hooks are supported, but all must exit successfully, else the operation (either generating a cruft pack or unpacking unreachable objects) will be halted.

gc.repackFilter
When repacking, use the specified filter to move certain objects into a separate packfile. See the --filter=<filter-spec> option of the section called “git-repack(1)”.
gc.repackFilterTo
When repacking and using a filter, see gc.repackFilter, the specified location will be used to create the packfile containing the filtered out objects. WARNING: The specified location should be accessible, using for example the Git alternates mechanism, otherwise the repo could be considered corrupt by Git as it might not be able to access the objects in that packfile. See the --filter-to=<dir> option of the section called “git-repack(1)” and the objects/info/alternates section of the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”.
gc.rerereResolved
Records of conflicted merge you resolved earlier are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 60 days. See the section called “git-rerere(1)”.
gc.rerereUnresolved
Records of conflicted merge you have not resolved are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 15 days. See the section called “git-rerere(1)”.
gitcvs.commitMsgAnnotation
Append this string to each commit message. Set to empty string to disable this feature. Defaults to "via git-CVS emulator".
gitcvs.enabled
Whether the CVS server interface is enabled for this repository. See the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”.
gitcvs.logFile
Path to a log file where the CVS server interface well… logs various stuff. See the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”.
gitcvs.usecrlfattr
If true, the server will look up the end-of-line conversion attributes for files to determine the -k modes to use. If the attributes force Git to treat a file as text, the -k mode will be left blank so CVS clients will treat it as text. If they suppress text conversion, the file will be set with -kb mode, which suppresses any newline munging the client might otherwise do. If the attributes do not allow the file type to be determined, then gitcvs.allBinary is used. See the section called “gitattributes(5)”.
gitcvs.allBinary
This is used if gitcvs.usecrlfattr does not resolve the correct -kb mode to use. If true, all unresolved files are sent to the client in mode -kb. This causes the client to treat them as binary files, which suppresses any newline munging it otherwise might do. Alternatively, if it is set to "guess", then the contents of the file are examined to decide if it is binary, similar to core.autocrlf.
gitcvs.dbName
Database used by git-cvsserver to cache revision information derived from the Git repository. The exact meaning depends on the used database driver, for SQLite (which is the default driver) this is a filename. Supports variable substitution (see the section called “git-cvsserver(1)” for details). May not contain semicolons (;). Default: %Ggitcvs.%m.sqlite
gitcvs.dbDriver
Used Perl DBI driver. You can specify any available driver for this here, but it might not work. git-cvsserver is tested with DBD::SQLite, reported to work with DBD::Pg, and reported not to work with DBD::mysql. Experimental feature. May not contain double colons (:). Default: SQLite. See the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”.
gitcvs.dbUser , gitcvs.dbPass
Database user and password. Only useful if setting gitcvs.dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database users and/or passwords. gitcvs.dbUser supports variable substitution (see the section called “git-cvsserver(1)” for details).
gitcvs.dbTableNamePrefix
Database table name prefix. Prepended to the names of any database tables used, allowing a single database to be used for several repositories. Supports variable substitution (see the section called “git-cvsserver(1)” for details). Any non-alphabetic characters will be replaced with underscores.

All gitcvs variables except for gitcvs.usecrlfattr and gitcvs.allBinary can also be specified as gitcvs.<access_method>.<varname> (where access_method is one of "ext" and "pserver") to make them apply only for the given access method.

gitweb.category , gitweb.description , gitweb.owner , gitweb.url
See the section called “gitweb(1)” for description.
gitweb.avatar , gitweb.blame , gitweb.grep , gitweb.highlight , gitweb.patches , gitweb.pickaxe , gitweb.remote_heads , gitweb.showSizes , gitweb.snapshot
See the section called “gitweb.conf(5)” for description.
gpg.program
Use this custom program instead of "gpg" found on $PATH when making or verifying a PGP signature. The program must support the same command-line interface as GPG, namely, to verify a detached signature, "gpg --verify $signature - <$file" is run, and the program is expected to signal a good signature by exiting with code 0. To generate an ASCII-armored detached signature, the standard input of "gpg -bsau $key" is fed with the contents to be signed, and the program is expected to send the result to its standard output.
gpg.format

Specifies which key format to use when signing with --gpg-sign. Default is "openpgp". Other possible values are "x509", "ssh".

See the section called “gitformat-signature(5)” for the signature format, which differs based on the selected gpg.format.

gpg.<format>.program
Use this to customize the program used for the signing format you chose. (see gpg.program and gpg.format) gpg.program can still be used as a legacy synonym for gpg.openpgp.program. The default value for gpg.x509.program is "gpgsm" and gpg.ssh.program is "ssh-keygen".
gpg.minTrustLevel

Specifies a minimum trust level for signature verification. If this option is unset, then signature verification for merge operations requires a key with at least marginal trust. Other operations that perform signature verification require a key with at least undefined trust. Setting this option overrides the required trust-level for all operations. Supported values, in increasing order of significance:

  • undefined
  • never
  • marginal
  • fully
  • ultimate
gpg.ssh.defaultKeyCommand
This command will be run when user.signingkey is not set and a ssh signature is requested. On successful exit a valid ssh public key prefixed with key:: is expected in the first line of its output. This allows for a script doing a dynamic lookup of the correct public key when it is impractical to statically configure user.signingKey. For example when keys or SSH Certificates are rotated frequently or selection of the right key depends on external factors unknown to git.
gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile

A file containing ssh public keys which you are willing to trust. The file consists of one or more lines of principals followed by an ssh public key. e.g.: user1@example.com,user2@example.com ssh-rsa AAAAX1... See ssh-keygen(1) "ALLOWED SIGNERS" for details. The principal is only used to identify the key and is available when verifying a signature.

SSH has no concept of trust levels like gpg does. To be able to differentiate between valid signatures and trusted signatures the trust level of a signature verification is set to fully when the public key is present in the allowedSignersFile. Otherwise the trust level is undefined and git verify-commit/tag will fail.

This file can be set to a location outside of the repository and every developer maintains their own trust store. A central repository server could generate this file automatically from ssh keys with push access to verify the code against. In a corporate setting this file is probably generated at a global location from automation that already handles developer ssh keys.

A repository that only allows signed commits can store the file in the repository itself using a path relative to the top-level of the working tree. This way only committers with an already valid key can add or change keys in the keyring.

Since OpensSSH 8.8 this file allows specifying a key lifetime using valid-after & valid-before options. Git will mark signatures as valid if the signing key was valid at the time of the signature's creation. This allows users to change a signing key without invalidating all previously made signatures.

Using a SSH CA key with the cert-authority option (see ssh-keygen(1) "CERTIFICATES") is also valid.

gpg.ssh.revocationFile
Either a SSH KRL or a list of revoked public keys (without the principal prefix). See ssh-keygen(1) for details. If a public key is found in this file then it will always be treated as having trust level "never" and signatures will show as invalid.
grep.lineNumber
If set to true, enable -n option by default.
grep.column
If set to true, enable the --column option by default.
grep.patternType
Set the default matching behavior. Using a value of basic, extended, fixed, or perl will enable the --basic-regexp, --extended-regexp, --fixed-strings, or --perl-regexp option accordingly, while the value default will use the grep.extendedRegexp option to choose between basic and extended.
grep.extendedRegexp
If set to true, enable --extended-regexp option by default. This option is ignored when the grep.patternType option is set to a value other than default.
grep.threads
Number of grep worker threads to use. If unset (or set to 0), Git will use as many threads as the number of logical cores available.
grep.fullName
If set to true, enable --full-name option by default.
grep.fallbackToNoIndex
If set to true, fall back to git grep --no-index if git grep is executed outside of a git repository. Defaults to false.
gui.commitMsgWidth
Defines how wide the commit message window is in the the section called “git-gui(1)”. "75" is the default.
gui.diffContext
Specifies how many context lines should be used in calls to diff made by the the section called “git-gui(1)”. The default is "5".
gui.displayUntracked
Determines if the section called “git-gui(1)” shows untracked files in the file list. The default is "true".
gui.encoding
Specifies the default character encoding to use for displaying of file contents in the section called “git-gui(1)” and the section called “gitk(1)”. It can be overridden by setting the encoding attribute for relevant files (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”). If this option is not set, the tools default to the locale encoding.
gui.matchTrackingBranch
Determines if new branches created with the section called “git-gui(1)” should default to tracking remote branches with matching names or not. Default: "false".
gui.newBranchTemplate
Is used as a suggested name when creating new branches using the the section called “git-gui(1)”.
gui.pruneDuringFetch
"true" if the section called “git-gui(1)” should prune remote-tracking branches when performing a fetch. The default value is "false".
gui.trustmtime
Determines if the section called “git-gui(1)” should trust the file modification timestamp or not. By default the timestamps are not trusted.
gui.spellingDictionary
Specifies the dictionary used for spell checking commit messages in the the section called “git-gui(1)”. When set to "none" spell checking is turned off.
gui.fastCopyBlame
If true, git gui blame uses -C instead of -C -C for original location detection. It makes blame significantly faster on huge repositories at the expense of less thorough copy detection.
gui.copyBlameThreshold
Specifies the threshold to use in git gui blame original location detection, measured in alphanumeric characters. See the the section called “git-blame(1)” manual for more information on copy detection.
gui.blamehistoryctx
Specifies the radius of history context in days to show in the section called “gitk(1)” for the selected commit, when the Show History Context menu item is invoked from git gui blame. If this variable is set to zero, the whole history is shown.
guitool.<name>.cmd
Specifies the shell command line to execute when the corresponding item of the the section called “git-gui(1)” Tools menu is invoked. This option is mandatory for every tool. The command is executed from the root of the working directory, and in the environment it receives the name of the tool as GIT_GUITOOL, the name of the currently selected file as FILENAME, and the name of the current branch as CUR_BRANCH (if the head is detached, CUR_BRANCH is empty).
guitool.<name>.needsFile
Run the tool only if a diff is selected in the GUI. It guarantees that FILENAME is not empty.
guitool.<name>.noConsole
Run the command silently, without creating a window to display its output.
guitool.<name>.noRescan
Don't rescan the working directory for changes after the tool finishes execution.
guitool.<name>.confirm
Show a confirmation dialog before actually running the tool.
guitool.<name>.argPrompt
Request a string argument from the user, and pass it to the tool through the ARGS environment variable. Since requesting an argument implies confirmation, the confirm option has no effect if this is enabled. If the option is set to true, yes, or 1, the dialog uses a built-in generic prompt; otherwise the exact value of the variable is used.
guitool.<name>.revPrompt
Request a single valid revision from the user, and set the REVISION environment variable. In other aspects this option is similar to argPrompt, and can be used together with it.
guitool.<name>.revUnmerged
Show only unmerged branches in the revPrompt subdialog. This is useful for tools similar to merge or rebase, but not for things like checkout or reset.
guitool.<name>.title
Specifies the title to use for the prompt dialog. The default is the tool name.
guitool.<name>.prompt
Specifies the general prompt string to display at the top of the dialog, before subsections for argPrompt and revPrompt. The default value includes the actual command.
help.browser
Specify the browser that will be used to display help in the web format. See the section called “git-help(1)”.
help.format
Override the default help format used by the section called “git-help(1)”. Values man, info, web and html are supported. man is the default. web and html are the same.
help.autoCorrect

If git detects typos and can identify exactly one valid command similar to the error, git will try to suggest the correct command or even run the suggestion automatically. Possible config values are:

  • 0, "false", "off", "no", "show": show the suggested command (default).
  • 1, "true", "on", "yes", "immediate": run the suggested command immediately.
  • positive number > 1: run the suggested command after specified deciseconds (0.1 sec).
  • "never": don't run or show any suggested command.
  • "prompt": show the suggestion and prompt for confirmation to run the command.
help.htmlPath
Specify the path where the HTML documentation resides. File system paths and URLs are supported. HTML pages will be prefixed with this path when help is displayed in the web format. This defaults to the documentation path of your Git installation.
http.proxy

Override the HTTP proxy, normally configured using the http_proxy, https_proxy, and all_proxy environment variables (see curl(1)). In addition to the syntax understood by curl, it is possible to specify a proxy string with a user name but no password, in which case git will attempt to acquire one in the same way it does for other credentials. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for more information. The syntax thus is [protocol://][user[:password]@]proxyhost[:port][/path]. This can be overridden on a per-remote basis; see remote.<name>.proxy

Any proxy, however configured, must be completely transparent and must not modify, transform, or buffer the request or response in any way. Proxies which are not completely transparent are known to cause various forms of breakage with Git.

http.proxyAuthMethod

Set the method with which to authenticate against the HTTP proxy. This only takes effect if the configured proxy string contains a user name part (i.e. is of the form user@host or user@host:port). This can be overridden on a per-remote basis; see remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod. Both can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_PROXY_AUTHMETHOD environment variable. Possible values are:

  • anyauth - Automatically pick a suitable authentication method. It is assumed that the proxy answers an unauthenticated request with a 407 status code and one or more Proxy-authenticate headers with supported authentication methods. This is the default.
  • basic - HTTP Basic authentication
  • digest - HTTP Digest authentication; this prevents the password from being transmitted to the proxy in clear text
  • negotiate - GSS-Negotiate authentication (compare the --negotiate option of curl(1))
  • ntlm - NTLM authentication (compare the --ntlm option of curl(1))
http.proxySSLCert
The pathname of a file that stores a client certificate to use to authenticate with an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CERT environment variable.
http.proxySSLKey
The pathname of a file that stores a private key to use to authenticate with an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_KEY environment variable.
http.proxySSLCertPasswordProtected
Enable Git's password prompt for the proxy SSL certificate. Otherwise OpenSSL will prompt the user, possibly many times, if the certificate or private key is encrypted. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CERT_PASSWORD_PROTECTED environment variable.
http.proxySSLCAInfo
Pathname to the file containing the certificate bundle that should be used to verify the proxy with when using an HTTPS proxy. Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_SSL_CAINFO environment variable.
http.emptyAuth
Attempt authentication without seeking a username or password. This can be used to attempt GSS-Negotiate authentication without specifying a username in the URL, as libcurl normally requires a username for authentication.
http.proactiveAuth

Attempt authentication without first making an unauthenticated attempt and receiving a 401 response. This can be used to ensure that all requests are authenticated. If http.emptyAuth is set to true, this value has no effect.

If the credential helper used specifies an authentication scheme (i.e., via the authtype field), that value will be used; if a username and password is provided without a scheme, then Basic authentication is used. The value of the option determines the scheme requested from the helper. Possible values are:

  • basic - Request Basic authentication from the helper.
  • auto - Allow the helper to pick an appropriate scheme.
  • none - Disable proactive authentication.

Note that TLS should always be used with this configuration, since otherwise it is easy to accidentally expose plaintext credentials if Basic authentication is selected.

http.delegation

Control GSSAPI credential delegation. The delegation is disabled by default in libcurl since version 7.21.7. Set parameter to tell the server what it is allowed to delegate when it comes to user credentials. Used with GSS/kerberos. Possible values are:

  • none - Don't allow any delegation.
  • policy - Delegates if and only if the OK-AS-DELEGATE flag is set in the Kerberos service ticket, which is a matter of realm policy.
  • always - Unconditionally allow the server to delegate.
http.extraHeader
Pass an additional HTTP header when communicating with a server. If more than one such entry exists, all of them are added as extra headers. To allow overriding the settings inherited from the system config, an empty value will reset the extra headers to the empty list.
http.cookieFile
The pathname of a file containing previously stored cookie lines, which should be used in the Git http session, if they match the server. The file format of the file to read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format (see curl(1)). Set it to an empty string, to accept only new cookies from the server and send them back in successive requests within same connection. NOTE that the file specified with http.cookieFile is used only as input unless http.saveCookies is set.
http.saveCookies
If set, store cookies received during requests to the file specified by http.cookieFile. Has no effect if http.cookieFile is unset, or set to an empty string.
http.version

Use the specified HTTP protocol version when communicating with a server. If you want to force the default. The available and default version depend on libcurl. Currently the possible values of this option are:

  • HTTP/2
  • HTTP/1.1
http.curloptResolve

Hostname resolution information that will be used first by libcurl when sending HTTP requests. This information should be in one of the following formats:

  • [+]HOST:PORT:ADDRESS[,ADDRESS]
  • -HOST:PORT

The first format redirects all requests to the given HOST:PORT to the provided ADDRESS(s). The second format clears all previous config values for that HOST:PORT combination. To allow easy overriding of all the settings inherited from the system config, an empty value will reset all resolution information to the empty list.

http.sslVersion

The SSL version to use when negotiating an SSL connection, if you want to force the default. The available and default version depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_VERSION option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this option and for the ssl version supported. Currently the possible values of this option are:

  • sslv2
  • sslv3
  • tlsv1
  • tlsv1.0
  • tlsv1.1
  • tlsv1.2
  • tlsv1.3

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_VERSION environment variable. To force git to use libcurl's default ssl version and ignore any explicit http.sslversion option, set GIT_SSL_VERSION to the empty string.

http.sslCipherList

A list of SSL ciphers to use when negotiating an SSL connection. The available ciphers depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this list.

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST environment variable. To force git to use libcurl's default cipher list and ignore any explicit http.sslCipherList option, set GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST to the empty string.

http.sslVerify
Whether to verify the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Defaults to true. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY environment variable.
http.sslCert
File containing the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT environment variable.
http.sslKey
File containing the SSL private key when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_KEY environment variable.
http.sslCertPasswordProtected
Enable Git's password prompt for the SSL certificate. Otherwise OpenSSL will prompt the user, possibly many times, if the certificate or private key is encrypted. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT_PASSWORD_PROTECTED environment variable.
http.sslCAInfo
File containing the certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAINFO environment variable.
http.sslCAPath
Path containing files with the CA certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAPATH environment variable.
http.sslBackend
Name of the SSL backend to use (e.g. "openssl" or "schannel"). This option is ignored if cURL lacks support for choosing the SSL backend at runtime.
http.sslCertType
Type of client certificate used when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. "PEM", "DER" are supported when using openssl or gnutls backends. "P12" is supported on "openssl", "schannel", "securetransport", and gnutls 8.11+. See also libcurl CURLOPT_SSLCERTTYPE. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT_TYPE environment variable.
http.sslKeyType
Type of client private key used when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. (e.g. "PEM", "DER", or "ENG"). Only applicable when using "openssl" backend. "DER" is not supported with openssl. Particularly useful when set to "ENG" for authenticating with PKCS#11 tokens, with a PKCS#11 URL in sslCert option. See also libcurl CURLOPT_SSLKEYTYPE. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_KEY_TYPE environment variable.
http.schannelCheckRevoke
Used to enforce or disable certificate revocation checks in cURL when http.sslBackend is set to "schannel". Defaults to true if unset. Only necessary to disable this if Git consistently errors and the message is about checking the revocation status of a certificate. This option is ignored if cURL lacks support for setting the relevant SSL option at runtime.
http.schannelUseSSLCAInfo
As of cURL v7.60.0, the Secure Channel backend can use the certificate bundle provided via http.sslCAInfo, but that would override the Windows Certificate Store. Since this is not desirable by default, Git will tell cURL not to use that bundle by default when the schannel backend was configured via http.sslBackend, unless http.schannelUseSSLCAInfo overrides this behavior.
http.pinnedPubkey
Public key of the https service. It may either be the filename of a PEM or DER encoded public key file or a string starting with sha256// followed by the base64 encoded sha256 hash of the public key. See also libcurl CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY. git will exit with an error if this option is set but not supported by cURL.
http.sslTry
Attempt to use AUTH SSL/TLS and encrypted data transfers when connecting via regular FTP protocol. This might be needed if the FTP server requires it for security reasons or you wish to connect securely whenever remote FTP server supports it. Default is false since it might trigger certificate verification errors on misconfigured servers.
http.maxRequests
How many HTTP requests to launch in parallel. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_MAX_REQUESTS environment variable. Default is 5.
http.minSessions
The number of curl sessions (counted across slots) to be kept across requests. They will not be ended with curl_easy_cleanup() until http_cleanup() is invoked. If USE_CURL_MULTI is not defined, this value will be capped at 1. Defaults to 1.
http.postBuffer

Maximum size in bytes of the buffer used by smart HTTP transports when POSTing data to the remote system. For requests larger than this buffer size, HTTP/1.1 and Transfer-Encoding: chunked is used to avoid creating a massive pack file locally. Default is 1 MiB, which is sufficient for most requests.

Note that raising this limit is only effective for disabling chunked transfer encoding and therefore should be used only where the remote server or a proxy only supports HTTP/1.0 or is noncompliant with the HTTP standard. Raising this is not, in general, an effective solution for most push problems, but can increase memory consumption significantly since the entire buffer is allocated even for small pushes.

http.lowSpeedLimit , http.lowSpeedTime
If the HTTP transfer speed, in bytes per second, is less than http.lowSpeedLimit for longer than http.lowSpeedTime seconds, the transfer is aborted. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT and GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_TIME environment variables.
http.keepAliveIdle
Specifies how long in seconds to wait on an idle connection before sending TCP keepalive probes (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_IDLE environment variable.
http.keepAliveInterval
Specifies how long in seconds to wait between TCP keepalive probes (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_INTERVAL environment variable.
http.keepAliveCount
Specifies how many TCP keepalive probes to send before giving up and terminating the connection (if supported by the OS). If unset, curl's default value is used. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_KEEPALIVE_COUNT environment variable.
http.noEPSV
A boolean which disables using of EPSV ftp command by curl. This can be helpful with some "poor" ftp servers which don't support EPSV mode. Can be overridden by the GIT_CURL_FTP_NO_EPSV environment variable. Default is false (curl will use EPSV).
http.userAgent
The HTTP USER_AGENT string presented to an HTTP server. The default value represents the version of the Git client such as git/1.7.1. This option allows you to override this value to a more common value such as Mozilla/4.0. This may be necessary, for instance, if connecting through a firewall that restricts HTTP connections to a set of common USER_AGENT strings (but not including those like git/1.7.1). Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable.
http.followRedirects
Whether git should follow HTTP redirects. If set to true, git will transparently follow any redirect issued by a server it encounters. If set to false, git will treat all redirects as errors. If set to initial, git will follow redirects only for the initial request to a remote, but not for subsequent follow-up HTTP requests. Since git uses the redirected URL as the base for the follow-up requests, this is generally sufficient. The default is initial.
http.<url>.*

Any of the http.* options above can be applied selectively to some URLs. For a config key to match a URL, each element of the config key is compared to that of the URL, in the following order:

  1. Scheme (e.g., https in https://example.com/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL.
  2. Host/domain name (e.g., example.com in https://example.com/). This field must match between the config key and the URL. It is possible to specify a * as part of the host name to match all subdomains at this level. https://*.example.com/ for example would match https://foo.example.com/, but not https://foo.bar.example.com/.
  3. Port number (e.g., 8080 in http://example.com:8080/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL. Omitted port numbers are automatically converted to the correct default for the scheme before matching.
  4. Path (e.g., repo.git in https://example.com/repo.git). The path field of the config key must match the path field of the URL either exactly or as a prefix of slash-delimited path elements. This means a config key with path foo/ matches URL path foo/bar. A prefix can only match on a slash (/) boundary. Longer matches take precedence (so a config key with path foo/bar is a better match to URL path foo/bar than a config key with just path foo/).
  5. User name (e.g., user in https://user@example.com/repo.git). If the config key has a user name it must match the user name in the URL exactly. If the config key does not have a user name, that config key will match a URL with any user name (including none), but at a lower precedence than a config key with a user name.

The list above is ordered by decreasing precedence; a URL that matches a config key's path is preferred to one that matches its user name. For example, if the URL is https://user@example.com/foo/bar a config key match of https://example.com/foo will be preferred over a config key match of https://user@example.com.

All URLs are normalized before attempting any matching (the password part, if embedded in the URL, is always ignored for matching purposes) so that equivalent URLs that are simply spelled differently will match properly. Environment variable settings always override any matches. The URLs that are matched against are those given directly to Git commands. This means any URLs visited as a result of a redirection do not participate in matching.

i18n.commitEncoding
Character encoding the commit messages are stored in; Git itself does not care per se, but this information is necessary e.g. when importing commits from emails or in the gitk graphical history browser (and possibly in other places in the future or in other porcelains). See e.g. the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”. Defaults to utf-8.
i18n.logOutputEncoding
Character encoding the commit messages are converted to when running git log and friends.
imap.folder
The folder to drop the mails into, which is typically the Drafts folder. For example: "INBOX.Drafts", "INBOX/Drafts" or "[Gmail]/Drafts". Required.
imap.tunnel
Command used to set up a tunnel to the IMAP server through which commands will be piped instead of using a direct network connection to the server. Required when imap.host is not set.
imap.host
A URL identifying the server. Use an imap:// prefix for non-secure connections and an imaps:// prefix for secure connections. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set, but required otherwise.
imap.user
The username to use when logging in to the server.
imap.pass
The password to use when logging in to the server.
imap.port
An integer port number to connect to on the server. Defaults to 143 for imap:// hosts and 993 for imaps:// hosts. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set.
imap.sslverify
A boolean to enable/disable verification of the server certificate used by the SSL/TLS connection. Default is true. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set.
imap.preformattedHTML
A boolean to enable/disable the use of html encoding when sending a patch. An html encoded patch will be bracketed with <pre> and have a content type of text/html. Ironically, enabling this option causes Thunderbird to send the patch as a plain/text, format=fixed email. Default is false.
imap.authMethod
Specify the authentication method for authenticating with the IMAP server. If Git was built with the NO_CURL option, or if your curl version is older than 7.34.0, or if you're running git-imap-send with the --no-curl option, the only supported method is CRAM-MD5. If this is not set then git imap-send uses the basic IMAP plaintext LOGIN command.
include.path , includeIf.<condition>.path
Special variables to include other configuration files. See the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section in the main the section called “git-config(1)” documentation, specifically the "Includes" and "Conditional Includes" subsections.
index.recordEndOfIndexEntries
Specifies whether the index file should include an "End Of Index Entry" section. This reduces index load time on multiprocessor machines but produces a message "ignoring EOIE extension" when reading the index using Git versions before 2.20. Defaults to true if index.threads has been explicitly enabled, false otherwise.
index.recordOffsetTable
Specifies whether the index file should include an "Index Entry Offset Table" section. This reduces index load time on multiprocessor machines but produces a message "ignoring IEOT extension" when reading the index using Git versions before 2.20. Defaults to true if index.threads has been explicitly enabled, false otherwise.
index.sparse
When enabled, write the index using sparse-directory entries. This has no effect unless core.sparseCheckout and core.sparseCheckoutCone are both enabled. Defaults to false.
index.threads
Specifies the number of threads to spawn when loading the index. This is meant to reduce index load time on multiprocessor machines. Specifying 0 or true will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPUs and set the number of threads accordingly. Specifying 1 or false will disable multithreading. Defaults to true.
index.version
Specify the version with which new index files should be initialized. This does not affect existing repositories. If feature.manyFiles is enabled, then the default is 4.
index.skipHash

When enabled, do not compute the trailing hash for the index file. This accelerates Git commands that manipulate the index, such as git add, git commit, or git status. Instead of storing the checksum, write a trailing set of bytes with value zero, indicating that the computation was skipped.

If you enable index.skipHash, then Git clients older than 2.13.0 will refuse to parse the index and Git clients older than 2.40.0 will report an error during git fsck.

init.templateDir
Specify the directory from which templates will be copied. (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section of the section called “git-init(1)”.)
init.defaultBranch
Allows overriding the default branch name e.g. when initializing a new repository.
init.defaultObjectFormat
Allows overriding the default object format for new repositories. See --object-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_HASH environment variable take precedence over this config.
init.defaultRefFormat
Allows overriding the default ref storage format for new repositories. See --ref-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_REF_FORMAT environment variable take precedence over this config.
instaweb.browser
Specify the program that will be used to browse your working repository in gitweb. See the section called “git-instaweb(1)”.
instaweb.httpd
The HTTP daemon command-line to start gitweb on your working repository. See the section called “git-instaweb(1)”.
instaweb.local
If true the web server started by the section called “git-instaweb(1)” will be bound to the local IP (127.0.0.1).
instaweb.modulePath
The default module path for the section called “git-instaweb(1)” to use instead of /usr/lib/apache2/modules. Only used if httpd is Apache.
instaweb.port
The port number to bind the gitweb httpd to. See the section called “git-instaweb(1)”.
interactive.singleKey
When set to true, allow the user to provide one-letter input with a single key (i.e., without hitting the Enter key) in interactive commands. This is currently used by the --patch mode of the section called “git-add(1)”, the section called “git-checkout(1)”, the section called “git-restore(1)”, the section called “git-commit(1)”, the section called “git-reset(1)”, and the section called “git-stash(1)”.
interactive.diffFilter
When an interactive command (such as git add --patch) shows a colorized diff, git will pipe the diff through the shell command defined by this configuration variable. The command may mark up the diff further for human consumption, provided that it retains a one-to-one correspondence with the lines in the original diff. Defaults to disabled (no filtering).
log.abbrevCommit
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --abbrev-commit. You may override this option with --no-abbrev-commit.
log.date

Set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date option. See the section called “git-log(1)” for details.

If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use, format "foo" will be used for the date format. Otherwise, "default" will be used.

log.decorate
Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the log command. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. This is the same as the --decorate option of the git log.
log.initialDecorationSet
By default, git log only shows decorations for certain known ref namespaces. If all is specified, then show all refs as decorations.
log.excludeDecoration
Exclude the specified patterns from the log decorations. This is similar to the --decorate-refs-exclude command-line option, but the config option can be overridden by the --decorate-refs option.
log.diffMerges
Set diff format to be used when --diff-merges=on is specified, see --diff-merges in the section called “git-log(1)” for details. Defaults to separate.
log.follow
If true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files and does not work well on non-linear history.
log.graphColors
A list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to draw history lines in git log --graph.
log.showRoot
If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like the section called “git-log(1)” or the section called “git-whatchanged(1)”, which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.
log.showSignature
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --show-signature.
log.mailmap
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --use-mailmap, otherwise assume --no-use-mailmap. True by default.
lsrefs.unborn
May be "advertise" (the default), "allow", or "ignore". If "advertise", the server will respond to the client sending "unborn" (as described in the section called “gitprotocol-v2(5)”) and will advertise support for this feature during the protocol v2 capability advertisement. "allow" is the same as "advertise" except that the server will not advertise support for this feature; this is useful for load-balanced servers that cannot be updated atomically (for example), since the administrator could configure "allow", then after a delay, configure "advertise".
mailinfo.scissors
If true, makes the section called “git-mailinfo(1)” (and therefore the section called “git-am(1)”) act by default as if the --scissors option was provided on the command-line. When active, this feature removes everything from the message body before a scissors line (i.e. consisting mainly of ">8", "8<" and "-").
mailmap.file
The location of an augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap, located in the root of the repository, is loaded first, then the mailmap file pointed to by this variable. The location of the mailmap file may be in a repository subdirectory, or somewhere outside of the repository itself. See the section called “git-shortlog(1)” and the section called “git-blame(1)”.
mailmap.blob
Like mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. If both mailmap.file and mailmap.blob are given, both are parsed, with entries from mailmap.file taking precedence. In a bare repository, this defaults to HEAD:.mailmap. In a non-bare repository, it defaults to empty.
maintenance.auto
This boolean config option controls whether some commands run git maintenance run --auto after doing their normal work. Defaults to true.
maintenance.autoDetach

Many Git commands trigger automatic maintenance after they have written data into the repository. This boolean config option controls whether this automatic maintenance shall happen in the foreground or whether the maintenance process shall detach and continue to run in the background.

If unset, the value of gc.autoDetach is used as a fallback. Defaults to true if both are unset, meaning that the maintenance process will detach.

maintenance.strategy

This string config option provides a way to specify one of a few recommended schedules for background maintenance. This only affects which tasks are run during git maintenance run --schedule=X commands, provided no --task=<task> arguments are provided. Further, if a maintenance.<task>.schedule config value is set, then that value is used instead of the one provided by maintenance.strategy. The possible strategy strings are:

  • none: This default setting implies no tasks are run at any schedule.
  • incremental: This setting optimizes for performing small maintenance activities that do not delete any data. This does not schedule the gc task, but runs the prefetch and commit-graph tasks hourly, the loose-objects and incremental-repack tasks daily, and the pack-refs task weekly.
maintenance.<task>.enabled
This boolean config option controls whether the maintenance task with name <task> is run when no --task option is specified to git maintenance run. These config values are ignored if a --task option exists. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.
maintenance.<task>.schedule
This config option controls whether or not the given <task> runs during a git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> command. The value must be one of "hourly", "daily", or "weekly".
maintenance.commit-graph.auto
This integer config option controls how often the commit-graph task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the commit-graph task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of reachable commits that are not in the commit-graph file is at least the value of maintenance.commit-graph.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.loose-objects.auto
This integer config option controls how often the loose-objects task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the loose-objects task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of loose objects is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize
This integer config option controls the maximum number of loose objects written into a packfile during the loose-objects task. The default is fifty thousand. Use value 0 to indicate no limit.
maintenance.incremental-repack.auto
This integer config option controls how often the incremental-repack task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the incremental-repack task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of pack-files not in the multi-pack-index is at least the value of maintenance.incremental-repack.auto. The default value is 10.
maintenance.reflog-expire.auto
This integer config option controls how often the reflog-expire task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the reflog-expire task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of expired reflog entries in the "HEAD" reflog is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.rerere-gc.auto
This integer config option controls how often the rerere-gc task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the rerere-gc task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, any positive value implies the command will run when the "rr-cache" directory exists and has at least one entry, regardless of whether it is stale or not. This heuristic may be refined in the future. The default value is 1.
maintenance.worktree-prune.auto
This integer config option controls how often the worktree-prune task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the worktree-prune task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of prunable worktrees exceeds the value. The default value is 1.
man.viewer
Specify the programs that may be used to display help in the man format. See the section called “git-help(1)”.
man.<tool>.cmd
Specify the command to invoke the specified man viewer. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the man page passed as an argument. (See the section called “git-help(1)”.)
man.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool that may be used to display help in the man format. See the section called “git-help(1)”.
merge.conflictStyle
Specify the style in which conflicted hunks are written out to working tree files upon merge. The default is "merge", which shows a <<<<<<< conflict marker, changes made by one side, a ======= marker, changes made by the other side, and then a >>>>>>> marker. An alternate style, "diff3", adds a ||||||| marker and the original text before the ======= marker. The "merge" style tends to produce smaller conflict regions than diff3, both because of the exclusion of the original text, and because when a subset of lines match on the two sides, they are just pulled out of the conflict region. Another alternate style, "zdiff3", is similar to diff3 but removes matching lines on the two sides from the conflict region when those matching lines appear near either the beginning or end of a conflict region.
merge.defaultToUpstream
If merge is called without any commit argument, merge the upstream branches configured for the current branch by using their last observed values stored in their remote-tracking branches. The values of the branch.<current branch>.merge that name the branches at the remote named by branch.<current-branch>.remote are consulted, and then they are mapped via remote.<remote>.fetch to their corresponding remote-tracking branches, and the tips of these tracking branches are merged. Defaults to true.
merge.ff
By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line).
merge.verifySignatures
If true, this is equivalent to the --verify-signatures command line option. See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
merge.branchdesc
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with the branch description text associated with them. Defaults to false.
merge.log
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with at most the specified number of one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged. Defaults to false, and true is a synonym for 20.
merge.suppressDest

By adding a glob that matches the names of integration branches to this multi-valued configuration variable, the default merge message computed for merges into these integration branches will omit "into <branch-name>" from its title.

An element with an empty value can be used to clear the list of globs accumulated from previous configuration entries. When there is no merge.suppressDest variable defined, the default value of master is used for backward compatibility.

merge.renameLimit
The number of files to consider in the exhaustive portion of rename detection during a merge. If not specified, defaults to the value of diff.renameLimit. If neither merge.renameLimit nor diff.renameLimit are specified, currently defaults to 7000. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.
merge.renames
Whether Git detects renames. If set to false, rename detection is disabled. If set to true, basic rename detection is enabled. Defaults to the value of diff.renames.
merge.directoryRenames

Whether Git detects directory renames, affecting what happens at merge time to new files added to a directory on one side of history when that directory was renamed on the other side of history. Possible values are:

false
Directory rename detection is disabled, meaning that such new files will be left behind in the old directory.
true
Directory rename detection is enabled, meaning that such new files will be moved into the new directory.
conflict
A conflict will be reported for such paths.

If merge.renames is false, merge.directoryRenames is ignored and treated as false. Defaults to conflict.

merge.renormalize
Tell Git that canonical representation of files in the repository has changed over time (e.g. earlier commits record text files with CRLF line endings, but recent ones use LF line endings). In such a repository, for each file where a three-way content merge is needed, Git can convert the data recorded in commits to a canonical form before performing a merge to reduce unnecessary conflicts. For more information, see section "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”.
merge.stat
Whether to print the diffstat between ORIG_HEAD and the merge result at the end of the merge. True by default.
merge.autoStash
When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run merge on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts. This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of the section called “git-merge(1)”. Defaults to false.
merge.tool
Controls which merge tool is used by the section called “git-mergetool(1)”. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.
merge.guitool

Controls which merge tool is used by the section called “git-mergetool(1)” when the -g/--gui flag is specified. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
Use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
bc
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc3
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc4
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
codecompare
Use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
deltawalker
Use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
diffmerge
Use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
diffuse
Use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
ecmerge
Use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
emerge
Use Emacs' Emerge
examdiff
Use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
guiffy
Use Guiffy's Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
gvimdiff
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
gvimdiff1
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
gvimdiff2
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
gvimdiff3
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) where only the MERGED file is shown
kdiff3
Use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
meld
Use Meld (requires a graphical session) with optional auto merge (see git help mergetool's CONFIGURATION section)
nvimdiff
Use Neovim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
nvimdiff1
Use Neovim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
nvimdiff2
Use Neovim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
nvimdiff3
Use Neovim where only the MERGED file is shown
opendiff
Use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
p4merge
Use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
smerge
Use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
tkdiff
Use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
tortoisemerge
Use TortoiseMerge (requires a graphical session)
vimdiff
Use Vim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
vimdiff1
Use Vim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
vimdiff2
Use Vim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
vimdiff3
Use Vim where only the MERGED file is shown
vscode
Use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
winmerge
Use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
xxdiff
Use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
merge.verbosity
Controls the amount of output shown by the recursive merge strategy. Level 0 outputs nothing except a final error message if conflicts were detected. Level 1 outputs only conflicts, 2 outputs conflicts and file changes. Level 5 and above outputs debugging information. The default is level 2. Can be overridden by the GIT_MERGE_VERBOSITY environment variable.
merge.<driver>.name
Defines a human-readable name for a custom low-level merge driver. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
merge.<driver>.driver
Defines the command that implements a custom low-level merge driver. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
merge.<driver>.recursive
Names a low-level merge driver to be used when performing an internal merge between common ancestors. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
mergetool.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the $PATH.
mergetool.<tool>.cmd
Specify the command to invoke the specified merge tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: BASE is the name of a temporary file containing the common base of the files to be merged, if available; LOCAL is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file on the current branch; REMOTE is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file from the branch being merged; MERGED contains the name of the file to which the merge tool should write the results of a successful merge.
mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved
Allows the user to override the global mergetool.hideResolved value for a specific tool. See mergetool.hideResolved for the full description.
mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode
For a custom merge command, specify whether the exit code of the merge command can be used to determine whether the merge was successful. If this is not set to true then the merge target file timestamp is checked, and the merge is assumed to have been successful if the file has been updated; otherwise, the user is prompted to indicate the success of the merge.
mergetool.meld.hasOutput
Older versions of meld do not support the --output option. Git will attempt to detect whether meld supports --output by inspecting the output of meld --help. Configuring mergetool.meld.hasOutput will make Git skip these checks and use the configured value instead. Setting mergetool.meld.hasOutput to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --output option, and false avoids using --output.
mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge
When the --auto-merge is given, meld will merge all non-conflicting parts automatically, highlight the conflicting parts, and wait for user decision. Setting mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --auto-merge option with meld. Setting this value to auto makes git detect whether --auto-merge is supported and will only use --auto-merge when available. A value of false avoids using --auto-merge altogether, and is the default value.
mergetool.<variant>.layout
Configure the split window layout for vimdiff's <variant>, which is any of vimdiff, nvimdiff, gvimdiff. Upon launching git mergetool with --tool=<variant> (or without --tool if merge.tool is configured as <variant>), Git will consult mergetool.<variant>.layout to determine the tool's layout. If the variant-specific configuration is not available, vimdiff ' s is used as fallback. If that too is not available, a default layout with 4 windows will be used. To configure the layout, see the BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section in the section called “git-mergetool(1)”.
mergetool.hideResolved
During a merge, Git will automatically resolve as many conflicts as possible and write the $MERGED file containing conflict markers around any conflicts that it cannot resolve; $LOCAL and $REMOTE normally are the versions of the file from before Git`s conflict resolution. This flag causes $LOCAL and $REMOTE to be overwritten so that only the unresolved conflicts are presented to the merge tool. Can be configured per-tool via the mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved configuration variable. Defaults to false.
mergetool.keepBackup
After performing a merge, the original file with conflict markers can be saved as a file with a .orig extension. If this variable is set to false then this file is not preserved. Defaults to true (i.e. keep the backup files).
mergetool.keepTemporaries
When invoking a custom merge tool, Git uses a set of temporary files to pass to the tool. If the tool returns an error and this variable is set to true, then these temporary files will be preserved; otherwise, they will be removed after the tool has exited. Defaults to false.
mergetool.writeToTemp
Git writes temporary BASE, LOCAL, and REMOTE versions of conflicting files in the worktree by default. Git will attempt to use a temporary directory for these files when set true. Defaults to false.
mergetool.prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program.
mergetool.guiDefault
Set true to use the merge.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select merge.guitool or merge.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the merge.guitool to be used.
notes.mergeStrategy

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on each strategy.

This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy option to the section called “git-notes(1)”.

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy
Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general notes.mergeStrategy. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on the available strategies.
notes.displayRef

Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once), in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the git log family of commands.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the the section called “git-log(1)” family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option accepted by those commands.

The effective value of core.notesRef (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

notes.rewrite.<command>

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true. See also notes.rewriteRef below.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

notes.rewriteMode

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the notes.rewrite.<command> option), determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

notes.rewriteRef

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times.

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further description of its format.

pack.window
The size of the window used by the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” when no window size is given on the command line. Defaults to 10.
pack.depth
The maximum delta depth used by the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” when no maximum depth is given on the command line. Defaults to 50. Maximum value is 4095.
pack.windowMemory
The maximum size of memory that is consumed by each thread in the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” for pack window memory when no limit is given on the command line. The value can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". When left unconfigured (or set explicitly to 0), there will be no limit.
pack.compression

An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to -1, the zlib default, which is "a default compromise between speed and compression (currently equivalent to level 6)."

Note that changing the compression level will not automatically recompress all existing objects. You can force recompression by passing the -F option to the section called “git-repack(1)”.

pack.allowPackReuse

When true or "single", and when reachability bitmaps are enabled, pack-objects will try to send parts of the bitmapped packfile verbatim. When "multi", and when a multi-pack reachability bitmap is available, pack-objects will try to send parts of all packs in the MIDX.

If only a single pack bitmap is available, and pack.allowPackReuse is set to "multi", reuse parts of just the bitmapped packfile. This can reduce memory and CPU usage to serve fetches, but might result in sending a slightly larger pack. Defaults to true.

pack.island
An extended regular expression configuring a set of delta islands. See "DELTA ISLANDS" in the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” for details.
pack.islandCore
Specify an island name which gets to have its objects be packed first. This creates a kind of pseudo-pack at the front of one pack, so that the objects from the specified island are hopefully faster to copy into any pack that should be served to a user requesting these objects. In practice this means that the island specified should likely correspond to what is the most commonly cloned in the repo. See also "DELTA ISLANDS" in the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
pack.deltaCacheSize
The maximum memory in bytes used for caching deltas in the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” before writing them out to a pack. This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Repacking large repositories on machines which are tight with memory might be badly impacted by this though, especially if this cache pushes the system into swapping. A value of 0 means no limit. The smallest size of 1 byte may be used to virtually disable this cache. Defaults to 256 MiB.
pack.deltaCacheLimit
The maximum size of a delta, that is cached in the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”. This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Defaults to 1000. Maximum value is 65535.
pack.threads
Specifies the number of threads to spawn when searching for best delta matches. This requires that the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” be compiled with pthreads otherwise this option is ignored with a warning. This is meant to reduce packing time on multiprocessor machines. The required amount of memory for the delta search window is however multiplied by the number of threads. Specifying 0 will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPUs and set the number of threads accordingly.
pack.indexVersion

Specify the default pack index version. Valid values are 1 for legacy pack index used by Git versions prior to 1.5.2, and 2 for the new pack index with capabilities for packs larger than 4 GB as well as proper protection against the repacking of corrupted packs. Version 2 is the default. Note that version 2 is enforced and this config option is ignored whenever the corresponding pack is larger than 2 GB.

If you have an old Git that does not understand the version 2 *.idx file, cloning or fetching over a non-native protocol (e.g. "http") that will copy both *.pack file and corresponding *.idx file from the other side may give you a repository that cannot be accessed with your older version of Git. If the *.pack file is smaller than 2 GB, however, you can use the section called “git-index-pack(1)” on the *.pack file to regenerate the *.idx file.

pack.packSizeLimit

The maximum size of a pack. This setting only affects packing to a file when repacking, i.e. the git:// protocol is unaffected. It can be overridden by the --max-pack-size option of the section called “git-repack(1)”. Reaching this limit results in the creation of multiple packfiles.

Note that this option is rarely useful, and may result in a larger total on-disk size (because Git will not store deltas between packs) and worse runtime performance (object lookup within multiple packs is slower than a single pack, and optimizations like reachability bitmaps cannot cope with multiple packs).

If you need to actively run Git using smaller packfiles (e.g., because your filesystem does not support large files), this option may help. But if your goal is to transmit a packfile over a medium that supports limited sizes (e.g., removable media that cannot store the whole repository), you are likely better off creating a single large packfile and splitting it using a generic multi-volume archive tool (e.g., Unix split).

The minimum size allowed is limited to 1 MiB. The default is unlimited. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

pack.useBitmaps
When true, git will use pack bitmaps (if available) when packing to stdout (e.g., during the server side of a fetch). Defaults to true. You should not generally need to turn this off unless you are debugging pack bitmaps.
pack.useBitmapBoundaryTraversal

When true, Git will use an experimental algorithm for computing reachability queries with bitmaps. Instead of building up complete bitmaps for all of the negated tips and then OR-ing them together, consider negated tips with existing bitmaps as additive (i.e. OR-ing them into the result if they exist, ignoring them otherwise), and build up a bitmap at the boundary instead.

When using this algorithm, Git may include too many objects as a result of not opening up trees belonging to certain UNINTERESTING commits. This inexactness matches the non-bitmap traversal algorithm.

In many cases, this can provide a speed-up over the exact algorithm, particularly when there is poor bitmap coverage of the negated side of the query.

pack.useSparse
When true, git will default to using the --sparse option in git pack-objects when the --revs option is present. This algorithm only walks trees that appear in paths that introduce new objects. This can have significant performance benefits when computing a pack to send a small change. However, it is possible that extra objects are added to the pack-file if the included commits contain certain types of direct renames. Default is true.
pack.preferBitmapTips

When selecting which commits will receive bitmaps, prefer a commit at the tip of any reference that is a suffix of any value of this configuration over any other commits in the "selection window".

Note that setting this configuration to refs/foo does not mean that the commits at the tips of refs/foo/bar and refs/foo/baz will necessarily be selected. This is because commits are selected for bitmaps from within a series of windows of variable length.

If a commit at the tip of any reference which is a suffix of any value of this configuration is seen in a window, it is immediately given preference over any other commit in that window.

pack.writeBitmaps (deprecated)
This is a deprecated synonym for repack.writeBitmaps.
pack.writeBitmapHashCache

When true, git will include a "hash cache" section in the bitmap index (if one is written). This cache can be used to feed git's delta heuristics, potentially leading to better deltas between bitmapped and non-bitmapped objects (e.g., when serving a fetch between an older, bitmapped pack and objects that have been pushed since the last gc). The downside is that it consumes 4 bytes per object of disk space. Defaults to true.

When writing a multi-pack reachability bitmap, no new namehashes are computed; instead, any namehashes stored in an existing bitmap are permuted into their appropriate location when writing a new bitmap.

pack.writeBitmapLookupTable
When true, Git will include a "lookup table" section in the bitmap index (if one is written). This table is used to defer loading individual bitmaps as late as possible. This can be beneficial in repositories that have relatively large bitmap indexes. Defaults to false.
pack.readReverseIndex
When true, git will read any .rev file(s) that may be available (see: the section called “gitformat-pack(5)”). When false, the reverse index will be generated from scratch and stored in memory. Defaults to true.
pack.writeReverseIndex
When true, git will write a corresponding .rev file (see: the section called “gitformat-pack(5)”) for each new packfile that it writes in all places except for the section called “git-fast-import(1)” and in the bulk checkin mechanism. Defaults to true.
pager.<cmd>
If the value is boolean, turns on or off pagination of the output of a particular Git subcommand when writing to a tty. Otherwise, turns on pagination for the subcommand using the pager specified by the value of pager.<cmd>. If --paginate or --no-pager is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option. To disable pagination for all commands, set core.pager or GIT_PAGER to cat.
pretty.<name>
Alias for a --pretty= format string, as specified in the section called “git-log(1)”. Any aliases defined here can be used just as the built-in pretty formats could. For example, running git config pretty.changelog "format:* %H %s" would cause the invocation git log --pretty=changelog to be equivalent to running git log "--pretty=format:* %H %s". Note that an alias with the same name as a built-in format will be silently ignored.
promisor.quiet
If set to "true" assume --quiet when fetching additional objects for a partial clone.
promisor.advertise
If set to "true", a server will use the "promisor-remote" capability, see the section called “gitprotocol-v2(5)”, to advertise the promisor remotes it is using, if it uses some. Default is "false", which means the "promisor-remote" capability is not advertised.
promisor.acceptFromServer
If set to "all", a client will accept all the promisor remotes a server might advertise using the "promisor-remote" capability. If set to "knownName" the client will accept promisor remotes which are already configured on the client and have the same name as those advertised by the client. This is not very secure, but could be used in a corporate setup where servers and clients are trusted to not switch name and URLs. If set to "knownUrl", the client will accept promisor remotes which have both the same name and the same URL configured on the client as the name and URL advertised by the server. This is more secure than "all" or "knownName", so it should be used if possible instead of those options. Default is "none", which means no promisor remote advertised by a server will be accepted. By accepting a promisor remote, the client agrees that the server might omit objects that are lazily fetchable from this promisor remote from its responses to "fetch" and "clone" requests from the client. Name and URL comparisons are case sensitive. See the section called “gitprotocol-v2(5)”.
protocol.allow

If set, provide a user defined default policy for all protocols which don't explicitly have a policy (protocol.<name>.allow). By default, if unset, known-safe protocols (http, https, git, ssh) have a default policy of always, known-dangerous protocols (ext) have a default policy of never, and all other protocols (including file) have a default policy of user. Supported policies:

  • always - protocol is always able to be used.
  • never - protocol is never able to be used.
  • user - protocol is only able to be used when GIT_PROTOCOL_FROM_USER is either unset or has a value of 1. This policy should be used when you want a protocol to be directly usable by the user but don't want it used by commands which execute clone/fetch/push commands without user input, e.g. recursive submodule initialization.
protocol.<name>.allow

Set a policy to be used by protocol <name> with clone/fetch/push commands. See protocol.allow above for the available policies.

The protocol names currently used by git are:

  • file: any local file-based path (including file:// URLs, or local paths)
  • git: the anonymous git protocol over a direct TCP connection (or proxy, if configured)
  • ssh: git over ssh (including host:path syntax, ssh://, etc).
  • http: git over http, both "smart http" and "dumb http". Note that this does not include https; if you want to configure both, you must do so individually.
  • any external helpers are named by their protocol (e.g., use hg to allow the git-remote-hg helper)
protocol.version

If set, clients will attempt to communicate with a server using the specified protocol version. If the server does not support it, communication falls back to version 0. If unset, the default is 2. Supported versions:

  • 0 - the original wire protocol.
  • 1 - the original wire protocol with the addition of a version string in the initial response from the server.
  • 2 - Wire protocol version 2, see the section called “gitprotocol-v2(5)”.
pull.ff
By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line). This setting overrides merge.ff when pulling.
pull.rebase

When true, rebase branches on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when "git pull" is run. See "branch.<name>.rebase" for setting this on a per-branch basis.

When merges (or just m), pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

When the value is interactive (or just i), the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

pull.octopus
The default merge strategy to use when pulling multiple branches at once.
pull.twohead
The default merge strategy to use when pulling a single branch.
push.autoSetupRemote
If set to "true" assume --set-upstream on default push when no upstream tracking exists for the current branch; this option takes effect with push.default options simple, upstream, and current. It is useful if by default you want new branches to be pushed to the default remote (like the behavior of push.default=current) and you also want the upstream tracking to be set. Workflows most likely to benefit from this option are simple central workflows where all branches are expected to have the same name on the remote.
push.default

Defines the action git push should take if no refspec is given (whether from the command-line, config, or elsewhere). Different values are well-suited for specific workflows; for instance, in a purely central workflow (i.e. the fetch source is equal to the push destination), upstream is probably what you want. Possible values are:

  • nothing - do not push anything (error out) unless a refspec is given. This is primarily meant for people who want to avoid mistakes by always being explicit.
  • current - push the current branch to update a branch with the same name on the receiving end. Works in both central and non-central workflows.
  • upstream - push the current branch back to the branch whose changes are usually integrated into the current branch (which is called @{upstream}). This mode only makes sense if you are pushing to the same repository you would normally pull from (i.e. central workflow).
  • tracking - This is a deprecated synonym for upstream.
  • simple - push the current branch with the same name on the remote.

    If you are working on a centralized workflow (pushing to the same repository you pull from, which is typically origin), then you need to configure an upstream branch with the same name.

    This mode is the default since Git 2.0, and is the safest option suited for beginners.

  • matching - push all branches having the same name on both ends. This makes the repository you are pushing to remember the set of branches that will be pushed out (e.g. if you always push maint and master there and no other branches, the repository you push to will have these two branches, and your local maint and master will be pushed there).

    To use this mode effectively, you have to make sure all the branches you would push out are ready to be pushed out before running git push, as the whole point of this mode is to allow you to push all of the branches in one go. If you usually finish work on only one branch and push out the result, while other branches are unfinished, this mode is not for you. Also this mode is not suitable for pushing into a shared central repository, as other people may add new branches there, or update the tip of existing branches outside your control.

    This used to be the default, but not since Git 2.0 (simple is the new default).

push.followTags
If set to true, enable --follow-tags option by default. You may override this configuration at time of push by specifying --no-follow-tags.
push.gpgSign
May be set to a boolean value, or the string if-asked. A true value causes all pushes to be GPG signed, as if --signed is passed to the section called “git-push(1)”. The string if-asked causes pushes to be signed if the server supports it, as if --signed=if-asked is passed to git push. A false value may override a value from a lower-priority config file. An explicit command-line flag always overrides this config option.
push.pushOption

When no --push-option=<option> argument is given from the command line, git push behaves as if each <value> of this variable is given as --push-option=<value>.

This is a multi-valued variable, and an empty value can be used in a higher priority configuration file (e.g. .git/config in a repository) to clear the values inherited from a lower priority configuration files (e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig).

Example:

/etc/gitconfig
  push.pushoption = a
  push.pushoption = b

~/.gitconfig
  push.pushoption = c

repo/.git/config
  push.pushoption =
  push.pushoption = b

This will result in only b (a and c are cleared).
push.recurseSubmodules
May be "check", "on-demand", "only", or "no", with the same behavior as that of "push --recurse-submodules". If not set, no is used by default, unless submodule.recurse is set (in which case a true value means on-demand).
push.useForceIfIncludes
If set to "true", it is equivalent to specifying --force-if-includes as an option to the section called “git-push(1)” in the command line. Adding --no-force-if-includes at the time of push overrides this configuration setting.
push.negotiate
If set to "true", attempt to reduce the size of the packfile sent by rounds of negotiation in which the client and the server attempt to find commits in common. If "false", Git will rely solely on the server's ref advertisement to find commits in common.
push.useBitmaps
If set to "false", disable use of bitmaps for "git push" even if pack.useBitmaps is "true", without preventing other git operations from using bitmaps. Default is true.
rebase.backend
Default backend to use for rebasing. Possible choices are apply or merge. In the future, if the merge backend gains all remaining capabilities of the apply backend, this setting may become unused.
rebase.stat
Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. False by default.
rebase.autoSquash
If set to true, enable the --autosquash option of the section called “git-rebase(1)” by default for interactive mode. This can be overridden with the --no-autosquash option.
rebase.autoStash
When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts. This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of the section called “git-rebase(1)”. Defaults to false.
rebase.updateRefs
If set to true enable --update-refs option by default.
rebase.missingCommitsCheck
If set to "warn", git rebase -i will print a warning if some commits are removed (e.g. a line was deleted), however the rebase will still proceed. If set to "error", it will print the previous warning and stop the rebase, git rebase --edit-todo can then be used to correct the error. If set to "ignore", no checking is done. To drop a commit without warning or error, use the drop command in the todo list. Defaults to "ignore".
rebase.instructionFormat
A format string, as specified in the section called “git-log(1)”, to be used for the todo list during an interactive rebase. The format will automatically have the commit hash prepended to the format.
rebase.abbreviateCommands

If set to true, git rebase will use abbreviated command names in the todo list resulting in something like this:

        p deadbee The oneline of the commit
        p fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
        ...

instead of:

        pick deadbee The oneline of the commit
        pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
        ...

Defaults to false.

rebase.rescheduleFailedExec
Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive mode (or when an --exec option was provided). This is the same as specifying the --reschedule-failed-exec option.
rebase.forkPoint
If set to false set --no-fork-point option by default.
rebase.rebaseMerges
Whether and how to set the --rebase-merges option by default. Can be rebase-cousins, no-rebase-cousins, or a boolean. Setting to true or to no-rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=no-rebase-cousins, setting to rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=rebase-cousins, and setting to false is equivalent to --no-rebase-merges. Passing --rebase-merges on the command line, with or without an argument, overrides any rebase.rebaseMerges configuration.
rebase.maxLabelLength
When generating label names from commit subjects, truncate the names to this length. By default, the names are truncated to a little less than NAME_MAX (to allow e.g. .lock files to be written for the corresponding loose refs).
receive.advertiseAtomic
By default, git-receive-pack will advertise the atomic push capability to its clients. If you don't want to advertise this capability, set this variable to false.
receive.advertisePushOptions
When set to true, git-receive-pack will advertise the push options capability to its clients. False by default.
receive.autogc
By default, git-receive-pack will run "git maintenance run --auto" after receiving data from git-push and updating refs. You can stop it by setting this variable to false.
receive.certNonceSeed
By setting this variable to a string, git receive-pack will accept a git push --signed and verify it by using a "nonce" protected by HMAC using this string as a secret key.
receive.certNonceSlop
When a git push --signed sends a push certificate with a "nonce" that was issued by a receive-pack serving the same repository within this many seconds, export the "nonce" found in the certificate to GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE to the hooks (instead of what the receive-pack asked the sending side to include). This may allow writing checks in pre-receive and post-receive a bit easier. Instead of checking GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_SLOP environment variable that records by how many seconds the nonce is stale to decide if they want to accept the certificate, they only can check GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_STATUS is OK.
receive.fsckObjects
If it is set to true, git-receive-pack will check all received objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.
receive.fsck.<msg-id>
Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by the section called “git-receive-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.
receive.fsck.skipList
Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by the section called “git-receive-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.
receive.keepAlive
After receiving the pack from the client, receive-pack may produce no output (if --quiet was specified) while processing the pack, causing some networks to drop the TCP connection. With this option set, if receive-pack does not transmit any data in this phase for receive.keepAlive seconds, it will send a short keepalive packet. The default is 5 seconds; set to 0 to disable keepalives entirely.
receive.unpackLimit
If the number of objects received in a push is below this limit then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.
receive.maxInputSize
If the size of the incoming pack stream is larger than this limit, then git-receive-pack will error out, instead of accepting the pack file. If not set or set to 0, then the size is unlimited.
receive.denyDeletes
If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the ref. Use this to prevent such a ref deletion via a push.
receive.denyDeleteCurrent
If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository.
receive.denyCurrentBranch

If set to true or "refuse", git-receive-pack will deny a ref update to the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository. Such a push is potentially dangerous because it brings the HEAD out of sync with the index and working tree. If set to "warn", print a warning of such a push to stderr, but allow the push to proceed. If set to false or "ignore", allow such pushes with no message. Defaults to "refuse".

Another option is "updateInstead" which will update the working tree if pushing into the current branch. This option is intended for synchronizing working directories when one side is not easily accessible via interactive ssh (e.g. a live web site, hence the requirement that the working directory be clean). This mode also comes in handy when developing inside a VM to test and fix code on different Operating Systems.

By default, "updateInstead" will refuse the push if the working tree or the index have any difference from the HEAD, but the push-to-checkout hook can be used to customize this. See the section called “githooks(5)”.

receive.denyNonFastForwards
If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update which is not a fast-forward. Use this to prevent such an update via a push, even if that push is forced. This configuration variable is set when initializing a shared repository.
receive.hideRefs
This variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to receive-pack (and so affects pushes, but not fetches). An attempt to update or delete a hidden ref by git push is rejected.
receive.procReceiveRefs

This is a multi-valued variable that defines reference prefixes to match the commands in receive-pack. Commands matching the prefixes will be executed by an external hook "proc-receive", instead of the internal execute_commands function. If this variable is not defined, the "proc-receive" hook will never be used, and all commands will be executed by the internal execute_commands function.

For example, if this variable is set to "refs/for", pushing to reference such as "refs/for/master" will not create or update a reference named "refs/for/master", but may create or update a pull request directly by running the hook "proc-receive".

Optional modifiers can be provided in the beginning of the value to filter commands for specific actions: create (a), modify (m), delete (d). A ! can be included in the modifiers to negate the reference prefix entry. E.g.:

git config --system --add receive.procReceiveRefs ad:refs/heads
git config --system --add receive.procReceiveRefs !:refs/heads
receive.updateServerInfo
If set to true, git-receive-pack will run git-update-server-info after receiving data from git-push and updating refs.
receive.shallowUpdate
If set to true, .git/shallow can be updated when new refs require new shallow roots. Otherwise those refs are rejected.
reftable.blockSize

The size in bytes used by the reftable backend when writing blocks. The block size is determined by the writer, and does not have to be a power of 2. The block size must be larger than the longest reference name or log entry used in the repository, as references cannot span blocks.

Powers of two that are friendly to the virtual memory system or filesystem (such as 4kB or 8kB) are recommended. Larger sizes (64kB) can yield better compression, with a possible increased cost incurred by readers during access.

The largest block size is 16777215 bytes (15.99 MiB). The default value is 4096 bytes (4kB). A value of 0 will use the default value.

reftable.restartInterval

The interval at which to create restart points. The reftable backend determines the restart points at file creation. Every 16 may be more suitable for smaller block sizes (4k or 8k), every 64 for larger block sizes (64k).

More frequent restart points reduces prefix compression and increases space consumed by the restart table, both of which increase file size.

Less frequent restart points makes prefix compression more effective, decreasing overall file size, with increased penalties for readers walking through more records after the binary search step.

A maximum of 65535 restart points per block is supported.

The default value is to create restart points every 16 records. A value of 0 will use the default value.

reftable.indexObjects

Whether the reftable backend shall write object blocks. Object blocks are a reverse mapping of object ID to the references pointing to them.

The default value is true.

reftable.geometricFactor

Whenever the reftable backend appends a new table to the stack, it performs auto compaction to ensure that there is only a handful of tables. The backend does this by ensuring that tables form a geometric sequence regarding the respective sizes of each table.

By default, the geometric sequence uses a factor of 2, meaning that for any table, the next-biggest table must at least be twice as big. A maximum factor of 256 is supported.

reftable.lockTimeout
Whenever the reftable backend appends a new table to the stack, it has to lock the central "tables.list" file before updating it. This config controls how long the process will wait to acquire the lock in case another process has already acquired it. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 100 (i.e., retry for 100ms).
remote.pushDefault
The remote to push to by default. Overrides branch.<name>.remote for all branches, and is overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote for specific branches.
remote.<name>.url
The URL of a remote repository. See the section called “git-fetch(1)” or the section called “git-push(1)”. A configured remote can have multiple URLs; in this case the first is used for fetching, and all are used for pushing (assuming no remote.<name>.pushurl is defined). Setting this key to the empty string clears the list of urls, allowing you to override earlier config.
remote.<name>.pushurl
The push URL of a remote repository. See the section called “git-push(1)”. If a pushurl option is present in a configured remote, it is used for pushing instead of remote.<name>.url. A configured remote can have multiple push URLs; in this case a push goes to all of them. Setting this key to the empty string clears the list of urls, allowing you to override earlier config.
remote.<name>.proxy
For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the URL to the proxy to use for that remote. Set to the empty string to disable proxying for that remote.
remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod
For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the method to use for authenticating against the proxy in use (probably set in remote.<name>.proxy). See http.proxyAuthMethod.
remote.<name>.fetch
The default set of "refspec" for the section called “git-fetch(1)”. See the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
remote.<name>.push
The default set of "refspec" for the section called “git-push(1)”. See the section called “git-push(1)”.
remote.<name>.mirror
If true, pushing to this remote will automatically behave as if the --mirror option was given on the command line.
remote.<name>.skipDefaultUpdate
A deprecated synonym to remote.<name>.skipFetchAll (if both are set in the configuration files with different values, the value of the last occurrence will be used).
remote.<name>.skipFetchAll
If true, this remote will be skipped when updating using the section called “git-fetch(1)”, the update subcommand of the section called “git-remote(1)”, and ignored by the prefetch task of git maintenance.
remote.<name>.receivepack
The default program to execute on the remote side when pushing. See option --receive-pack of the section called “git-push(1)”.
remote.<name>.uploadpack
The default program to execute on the remote side when fetching. See option --upload-pack of the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)”.
remote.<name>.tagOpt
Setting this value to --no-tags disables automatic tag following when fetching from remote <name>. Setting it to --tags will fetch every tag from remote <name>, even if they are not reachable from remote branch heads. Passing these flags directly to the section called “git-fetch(1)” can override this setting. See options --tags and --no-tags of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
remote.<name>.vcs
Setting this to a value <vcs> will cause Git to interact with the remote with the git-remote-<vcs> helper.
remote.<name>.prune
When set to true, fetching from this remote by default will also remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote (as if the --prune option was given on the command line). Overrides fetch.prune settings, if any.
remote.<name>.pruneTags

When set to true, fetching from this remote by default will also remove any local tags that no longer exist on the remote if pruning is activated in general via remote.<name>.prune, fetch.prune or --prune. Overrides fetch.pruneTags settings, if any.

See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.

remote.<name>.promisor
When set to true, this remote will be used to fetch promisor objects.
remote.<name>.partialclonefilter
The filter that will be applied when fetching from this promisor remote. Changing or clearing this value will only affect fetches for new commits. To fetch associated objects for commits already present in the local object database, use the --refetch option of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
remote.<name>.serverOption

The default set of server options used when fetching from this remote. These server options can be overridden by the --server-option= command line arguments.

This is a multi-valued variable, and an empty value can be used in a higher priority configuration file (e.g. .git/config in a repository) to clear the values inherited from a lower priority configuration files (e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig).

remote.<name>.followRemoteHEAD
How the section called “git-fetch(1)” should handle updates to remotes/<name>/HEAD when fetching using the configured refspecs of a remote. The default value is "create", which will create remotes/<name>/HEAD if it exists on the remote, but not locally; this will not touch an already existing local reference. Setting it to "warn" will print a message if the remote has a different value than the local one; in case there is no local reference, it behaves like "create". A variant on "warn" is "warn-if-not-$branch", which behaves like "warn", but if HEAD on the remote is $branch it will be silent. Setting it to "always" will silently update remotes/<name>/HEAD to the value on the remote. Finally, setting it to "never" will never change or create the local reference.
remotes.<group>
The list of remotes which are fetched by "git remote update <group>". See the section called “git-remote(1)”.
repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
By default, the section called “git-repack(1)” creates packs that use delta-base offset. If you need to share your repository with Git older than version 1.4.4, either directly or via a dumb protocol such as http, then you need to set this option to "false" and repack. Access from old Git versions over the native protocol are unaffected by this option.
repack.packKeptObjects
If set to true, makes git repack act as if --pack-kept-objects was passed. See the section called “git-repack(1)” for details. Defaults to false normally, but true if a bitmap index is being written (either via --write-bitmap-index or repack.writeBitmaps).
repack.useDeltaIslands
If set to true, makes git repack act as if --delta-islands was passed. Defaults to false.
repack.writeBitmaps
When true, git will write a bitmap index when packing all objects to disk (e.g., when git repack -a is run). This index can speed up the "counting objects" phase of subsequent packs created for clones and fetches, at the cost of some disk space and extra time spent on the initial repack. This has no effect if multiple packfiles are created. Defaults to true on bare repos, false otherwise.
repack.updateServerInfo
If set to false, the section called “git-repack(1)” will not run the section called “git-update-server-info(1)”. Defaults to true. Can be overridden when true by the -n option of the section called “git-repack(1)”.
repack.cruftWindow , repack.cruftWindowMemory , repack.cruftDepth , repack.cruftThreads
Parameters used by the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” when generating a cruft pack and the respective parameters are not given over the command line. See similarly named pack.* configuration variables for defaults and meaning.
rerere.autoUpdate
When set to true, git-rerere updates the index with the resulting contents after it cleanly resolves conflicts using previously recorded resolutions. Defaults to false.
rerere.enabled
Activate recording of resolved conflicts, so that identical conflict hunks can be resolved automatically, should they be encountered again. By default, the section called “git-rerere(1)” is enabled if there is an rr-cache directory under the $GIT_DIR, e.g. if "rerere" was previously used in the repository.
revert.reference
Setting this variable to true makes git revert behave as if the --reference option is given.
safe.bareRepository

Specifies which bare repositories Git will work with. The currently supported values are:

  • all: Git works with all bare repositories. This is the default.
  • explicit: Git only works with bare repositories specified via the top-level --git-dir command-line option, or the GIT_DIR environment variable (see the section called “git(1)”).

    If you do not use bare repositories in your workflow, then it may be beneficial to set safe.bareRepository to explicit in your global config. This will protect you from attacks that involve cloning a repository that contains a bare repository and running a Git command within that directory.

    This config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see the section called “SCOPES”). This prevents untrusted repositories from tampering with this value.

safe.directory

These config entries specify Git-tracked directories that are considered safe even if they are owned by someone other than the current user. By default, Git will refuse to even parse a Git config of a repository owned by someone else, let alone run its hooks, and this config setting allows users to specify exceptions, e.g. for intentionally shared repositories (see the --shared option in the section called “git-init(1)”).

This is a multi-valued setting, i.e. you can add more than one directory via git config --add. To reset the list of safe directories (e.g. to override any such directories specified in the system config), add a safe.directory entry with an empty value.

This config setting is only respected in protected configuration (see the section called “SCOPES”). This prevents untrusted repositories from tampering with this value.

The value of this setting is interpolated, i.e. ~/<path> expands to a path relative to the home directory and %(prefix)/<path> expands to a path relative to Git's (runtime) prefix.

To completely opt-out of this security check, set safe.directory to the string *. This will allow all repositories to be treated as if their directory was listed in the safe.directory list. If safe.directory=* is set in system config and you want to re-enable this protection, then initialize your list with an empty value before listing the repositories that you deem safe. Giving a directory with /* appended to it will allow access to all repositories under the named directory.

As explained, Git only allows you to access repositories owned by yourself, i.e. the user who is running Git, by default. When Git is running as root in a non Windows platform that provides sudo, however, git checks the SUDO_UID environment variable that sudo creates and will allow access to the uid recorded as its value in addition to the id from root. This is to make it easy to perform a common sequence during installation "make && sudo make install". A git process running under sudo runs as root but the sudo command exports the environment variable to record which id the original user has. If that is not what you would prefer and want git to only trust repositories that are owned by root instead, then you can remove the SUDO_UID variable from root's environment before invoking git.

sendemail.identity
A configuration identity. When given, causes values in the sendemail.<identity> subsection to take precedence over values in the sendemail section. The default identity is the value of sendemail.identity.
sendemail.smtpEncryption
See the section called “git-send-email(1)” for description. Note that this setting is not subject to the identity mechanism.
sendemail.smtpSSLCertPath
Path to ca-certificates (either a directory or a single file). Set it to an empty string to disable certificate verification.
sendemail.<identity>.*
Identity-specific versions of the sendemail.* parameters found below, taking precedence over those when this identity is selected, through either the command-line or sendemail.identity.
sendemail.multiEdit
If true (default), a single editor instance will be spawned to edit files you have to edit (patches when --annotate is used, and the summary when --compose is used). If false, files will be edited one after the other, spawning a new editor each time.
sendemail.confirm
Sets the default for whether to confirm before sending. Must be one of always, never, cc, compose, or auto. See --confirm in the the section called “git-send-email(1)” documentation for the meaning of these values.
sendemail.mailmap
If true, makes the section called “git-send-email(1)” assume --mailmap, otherwise assume --no-mailmap. False by default.
sendemail.mailmap.file
The location of a the section called “git-send-email(1)” specific augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap and mailmap.file are loaded first. Thus, entries in this file take precedence over entries in the default mailmap locations. See the section called “gitmailmap(5)”.
sendemail.mailmap.blob
Like sendemail.mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. Entries in sendemail.mailmap.file take precedence over entries here. See the section called “gitmailmap(5)”.
sendemail.aliasesFile
To avoid typing long email addresses, point this to one or more email aliases files. You must also supply sendemail.aliasFileType.
sendemail.aliasFileType

Format of the file(s) specified in sendemail.aliasesFile. Must be one of mutt, mailrc, pine, elm, gnus, or sendmail.

What an alias file in each format looks like can be found in the documentation of the email program of the same name. The differences and limitations from the standard formats are described below:

sendmail
  • Quoted aliases and quoted addresses are not supported: lines that contain a " symbol are ignored.
  • Redirection to a file (/path/name) or pipe (|command) is not supported.
  • File inclusion (:include: /path/name) is not supported.
  • Warnings are printed on the standard error output for any explicitly unsupported constructs, and any other lines that are not recognized by the parser.
sendemail.annotate , sendemail.bcc , sendemail.cc , sendemail.ccCmd , sendemail.chainReplyTo , sendemail.envelopeSender , sendemail.from , sendemail.headerCmd , sendemail.signedOffByCc , sendemail.smtpPass , sendemail.suppressCc , sendemail.suppressFrom , sendemail.to , sendemail.toCmd , sendemail.smtpDomain , sendemail.smtpServer , sendemail.smtpServerPort , sendemail.smtpServerOption , sendemail.smtpUser , sendemail.thread , sendemail.transferEncoding , sendemail.validate , sendemail.xmailer
These configuration variables all provide a default for the section called “git-send-email(1)” command-line options. See its documentation for details.
sendemail.signedOffCc (deprecated)
Deprecated alias for sendemail.signedOffByCc.
sendemail.smtpBatchSize
Number of messages to be sent per connection, after that a relogin will happen. If the value is 0 or undefined, send all messages in one connection. See also the --batch-size option of the section called “git-send-email(1)”.
sendemail.smtpReloginDelay
Seconds to wait before reconnecting to the smtp server. See also the --relogin-delay option of the section called “git-send-email(1)”.
sendemail.forbidSendmailVariables
To avoid common misconfiguration mistakes, the section called “git-send-email(1)” will abort with a warning if any configuration options for "sendmail" exist. Set this variable to bypass the check.
sequence.editor
Text editor used by git rebase -i for editing the rebase instruction file. The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. It can be overridden by the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable. When not configured, the default commit message editor is used instead.
showBranch.default
The default set of branches for the section called “git-show-branch(1)”. See the section called “git-show-branch(1)”.
sparse.expectFilesOutsideOfPatterns

Typically with sparse checkouts, files not matching any sparsity patterns are marked with a SKIP_WORKTREE bit in the index and are missing from the working tree. Accordingly, Git will ordinarily check whether files with the SKIP_WORKTREE bit are in fact present in the working tree contrary to expectations. If Git finds any, it marks those paths as present by clearing the relevant SKIP_WORKTREE bits. This option can be used to tell Git that such present-despite-skipped files are expected and to stop checking for them.

The default is false, which allows Git to automatically recover from the list of files in the index and working tree falling out of sync.

Set this to true if you are in a setup where some external factor relieves Git of the responsibility for maintaining the consistency between the presence of working tree files and sparsity patterns. For example, if you have a Git-aware virtual file system that has a robust mechanism for keeping the working tree and the sparsity patterns up to date based on access patterns.

Regardless of this setting, Git does not check for present-despite-skipped files unless sparse checkout is enabled, so this config option has no effect unless core.sparseCheckout is true.

splitIndex.maxPercentChange
When the split index feature is used, this specifies the percent of entries the split index can contain compared to the total number of entries in both the split index and the shared index before a new shared index is written. The value should be between 0 and 100. If the value is 0, then a new shared index is always written; if it is 100, a new shared index is never written. By default, the value is 20, so a new shared index is written if the number of entries in the split index would be greater than 20 percent of the total number of entries. See the section called “git-update-index(1)”.
splitIndex.sharedIndexExpire
When the split index feature is used, shared index files that were not modified since the time this variable specifies will be removed when a new shared index file is created. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. The default value is "2.weeks.ago". Note that a shared index file is considered modified (for the purpose of expiration) each time a new split-index file is either created based on it or read from it. See the section called “git-update-index(1)”.
ssh.variant

By default, Git determines the command line arguments to use based on the basename of the configured SSH command (configured using the environment variable GIT_SSH or GIT_SSH_COMMAND or the config setting core.sshCommand). If the basename is unrecognized, Git will attempt to detect support of OpenSSH options by first invoking the configured SSH command with the -G (print configuration) option and will subsequently use OpenSSH options (if that is successful) or no options besides the host and remote command (if it fails).

The config variable ssh.variant can be set to override this detection. Valid values are ssh (to use OpenSSH options), plink, putty, tortoiseplink, simple (no options except the host and remote command). The default auto-detection can be explicitly requested using the value auto. Any other value is treated as ssh. This setting can also be overridden via the environment variable GIT_SSH_VARIANT.

The current command-line parameters used for each variant are as follows:

  • ssh - [-p port] [-4] [-6] [-o option] [username@]host command
  • simple - [username@]host command
  • plink or putty - [-P port] [-4] [-6] [username@]host command
  • tortoiseplink - [-P port] [-4] [-6] -batch [username@]host command

Except for the simple variant, command-line parameters are likely to change as git gains new features.

stash.showIncludeUntracked
If this is set to true, the git stash show command will show the untracked files of a stash entry. Defaults to false. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.
stash.showPatch
If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show the stash entry in patch form. Defaults to false. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.
stash.showStat
If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show a diffstat of the stash entry. Defaults to true. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.
status.relativePaths
By default, the section called “git-status(1)” shows paths relative to the current directory. Setting this variable to false shows paths relative to the repository root (this was the default for Git prior to v1.5.4).
status.short
Set to true to enable --short by default in the section called “git-status(1)”. The option --no-short takes precedence over this variable.
status.branch
Set to true to enable --branch by default in the section called “git-status(1)”. The option --no-branch takes precedence over this variable.
status.aheadBehind
Set to true to enable --ahead-behind and false to enable --no-ahead-behind by default in the section called “git-status(1)” for non-porcelain status formats. Defaults to true.
status.displayCommentPrefix
If set to true, the section called “git-status(1)” will insert a comment prefix before each output line (starting with core.commentChar, i.e. # by default). This was the behavior of the section called “git-status(1)” in Git 1.8.4 and previous. Defaults to false.
status.renameLimit
The number of files to consider when performing rename detection in the section called “git-status(1)” and the section called “git-commit(1)”. Defaults to the value of diff.renameLimit.
status.renames
Whether and how Git detects renames in the section called “git-status(1)” and the section called “git-commit(1)” . If set to "false", rename detection is disabled. If set to "true", basic rename detection is enabled. If set to "copies" or "copy", Git will detect copies, as well. Defaults to the value of diff.renames.
status.showStash
If set to true, the section called “git-status(1)” will display the number of entries currently stashed away. Defaults to false.
status.showUntrackedFiles

By default, the section called “git-status(1)” and the section called “git-commit(1)” show files which are not currently tracked by Git. Directories which contain only untracked files, are shown with the directory name only. Showing untracked files means that Git needs to lstat() all the files in the whole repository, which might be slow on some systems. So, this variable controls how the commands display the untracked files. Possible values are:

  • no - Show no untracked files.
  • normal - Show untracked files and directories.
  • all - Show also individual files in untracked directories.

If this variable is not specified, it defaults to normal. All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal and false as no. This variable can be overridden with the -u|--untracked-files option of the section called “git-status(1)” and the section called “git-commit(1)”.

status.submoduleSummary
Defaults to false. If this is set to a non-zero number or true (identical to -1 or an unlimited number), the submodule summary will be enabled and a summary of commits for modified submodules will be shown (see --summary-limit option of the section called “git-submodule(1)”). Please note that the summary output command will be suppressed for all submodules when diff.ignoreSubmodules is set to all or only for those submodules where submodule.<name>.ignore=all. The only exception to that rule is that status and commit will show staged submodule changes. To also view the summary for ignored submodules you can either use the --ignore-submodules=dirty command-line option or the git submodule summary command, which shows a similar output but does not honor these settings.
submodule.<name>.url
The URL for a submodule. This variable is copied from the .gitmodules file to the git config via git submodule init. The user can change the configured URL before obtaining the submodule via git submodule update. If neither submodule.<name>.active nor submodule.active are set, the presence of this variable is used as a fallback to indicate whether the submodule is of interest to git commands. See the section called “git-submodule(1)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)” for details.
submodule.<name>.update
The method by which a submodule is updated by git submodule update, which is the only affected command, others such as git checkout --recurse-submodules are unaffected. It exists for historical reasons, when git submodule was the only command to interact with submodules; settings like submodule.active and pull.rebase are more specific. It is populated by git submodule init from the the section called “gitmodules(5)” file. See description of update command in the section called “git-submodule(1)”.
submodule.<name>.branch
The remote branch name for a submodule, used by git submodule update --remote. Set this option to override the value found in the .gitmodules file. See the section called “git-submodule(1)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)” for details.
submodule.<name>.fetchRecurseSubmodules
This option can be used to control recursive fetching of this submodule. It can be overridden by using the --[no-]recurse-submodules command-line option to "git fetch" and "git pull". This setting will override that from in the the section called “gitmodules(5)” file.
submodule.<name>.ignore
Defines under what circumstances "git status" and the diff family show a submodule as modified. When set to "all", it will never be considered modified (but it will nonetheless show up in the output of status and commit when it has been staged), "dirty" will ignore all changes to the submodule's work tree and takes only differences between the HEAD of the submodule and the commit recorded in the superproject into account. "untracked" will additionally let submodules with modified tracked files in their work tree show up. Using "none" (the default when this option is not set) also shows submodules that have untracked files in their work tree as changed. This setting overrides any setting made in .gitmodules for this submodule, both settings can be overridden on the command line by using the "--ignore-submodules" option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting.
submodule.<name>.active
Boolean value indicating if the submodule is of interest to git commands. This config option takes precedence over the submodule.active config option. See the section called “gitsubmodules(7)” for details.
submodule.active
A repeated field which contains a pathspec used to match against a submodule's path to determine if the submodule is of interest to git commands. See the section called “gitsubmodules(7)” for details.
submodule.recurse

A boolean indicating if commands should enable the --recurse-submodules option by default. Defaults to false.

When set to true, it can be deactivated via the --no-recurse-submodules option. Note that some Git commands lacking this option may call some of the above commands affected by submodule.recurse; for instance git remote update will call git fetch but does not have a --no-recurse-submodules option. For these commands a workaround is to temporarily change the configuration value by using git -c submodule.recurse=0.

The following list shows the commands that accept --recurse-submodules and whether they are supported by this setting.

  • checkout, fetch, grep, pull, push, read-tree, reset, restore and switch are always supported.
  • clone and ls-files are not supported.
  • branch is supported only if submodule.propagateBranches is enabled
submodule.propagateBranches
[EXPERIMENTAL] A boolean that enables branching support when using --recurse-submodules or submodule.recurse=true. Enabling this will allow certain commands to accept --recurse-submodules and certain commands that already accept --recurse-submodules will now consider branches. Defaults to false.
submodule.fetchJobs
Specifies how many submodules are fetched/cloned at the same time. A positive integer allows up to that number of submodules fetched in parallel. A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.
submodule.alternateLocation
Specifies how the submodules obtain alternates when submodules are cloned. Possible values are no, superproject. By default no is assumed, which doesn't add references. When the value is set to superproject the submodule to be cloned computes its alternates location relative to the superprojects alternate.
submodule.alternateErrorStrategy
Specifies how to treat errors with the alternates for a submodule as computed via submodule.alternateLocation. Possible values are ignore, info, die. Default is die. Note that if set to ignore or info, and if there is an error with the computed alternate, the clone proceeds as if no alternate was specified.
tag.forceSignAnnotated
A boolean to specify whether annotated tags created should be GPG signed. If --annotate is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option.
tag.sort
This variable controls the sort ordering of tags when displayed by the section called “git-tag(1)”. Without the "--sort=<value>" option provided, the value of this variable will be used as the default.
tag.gpgSign
A boolean to specify whether all tags should be GPG signed. Use of this option when running in an automated script can result in a large number of tags being signed. It is therefore convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your gpg passphrase several times. Note that this option doesn't affect tag signing behavior enabled by "-u <keyid>" or "--local-user=<keyid>" options.
tar.umask
This variable can be used to restrict the permission bits of tar archive entries. The default is 0002, which turns off the world write bit. The special value "user" indicates that the archiving user's umask will be used instead. See umask(2) and the section called “git-archive(1)”.

Trace2 config settings are only read from the system and global config files; repository local and worktree config files and -c command line arguments are not respected.

trace2.normalTarget
This variable controls the normal target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2 environment variable. The following table shows possible values.
trace2.perfTarget
This variable controls the performance target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_PERF environment variable. The following table shows possible values.
trace2.eventTarget

This variable controls the event target destination. It may be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT environment variable. The following table shows possible values.

  • 0 or false - Disables the target.
  • 1 or true - Writes to STDERR.
  • [2-9] - Writes to the already opened file descriptor.
  • <absolute-pathname> - Writes to the file in append mode. If the target already exists and is a directory, the traces will be written to files (one per process) underneath the given directory.
  • af_unix:[<socket-type>:]<absolute-pathname> - Write to a Unix DomainSocket (on platforms that support them). Socket type can be either stream or dgram; if omitted Git will try both.
trace2.normalBrief
Boolean. When true time, filename, and line fields are omitted from normal output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.
trace2.perfBrief
Boolean. When true time, filename, and line fields are omitted from PERF output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_PERF_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.
trace2.eventBrief
Boolean. When true time, filename, and line fields are omitted from event output. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT_BRIEF environment variable. Defaults to false.
trace2.eventNesting
Integer. Specifies desired depth of nested regions in the event output. Regions deeper than this value will be omitted. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_EVENT_NESTING environment variable. Defaults to 2.
trace2.configParams
A comma-separated list of patterns of "important" config settings that should be recorded in the trace2 output. For example, core.*,remote.*.url would cause the trace2 output to contain events listing each configured remote. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_CONFIG_PARAMS environment variable. Unset by default.
trace2.envVars
A comma-separated list of "important" environment variables that should be recorded in the trace2 output. For example, GIT_HTTP_USER_AGENT,GIT_CONFIG would cause the trace2 output to contain events listing the overrides for HTTP user agent and the location of the Git configuration file (assuming any are set). May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_ENV_VARS environment variable. Unset by default.
trace2.destinationDebug
Boolean. When true Git will print error messages when a trace target destination cannot be opened for writing. By default, these errors are suppressed and tracing is silently disabled. May be overridden by the GIT_TRACE2_DST_DEBUG environment variable.
trace2.maxFiles
Integer. When writing trace files to a target directory, do not write additional traces if doing so would exceed this many files. Instead, write a sentinel file that will block further tracing to this directory. Defaults to 0, which disables this check.
trailer.separators

This option tells which characters are recognized as trailer separators. By default only : is recognized as a trailer separator, except that = is always accepted on the command line for compatibility with other git commands.

The first character given by this option will be the default character used when another separator is not specified in the config for this trailer.

For example, if the value for this option is "%=$", then only lines using the format <key><sep><value> with <sep> containing %, = or $ and then spaces will be considered trailers. And % will be the default separator used, so by default trailers will appear like: <key>% <value> (one percent sign and one space will appear between the key and the value).

trailer.where

This option tells where a new trailer will be added.

This can be end, which is the default, start, after or before.

If it is end, then each new trailer will appear at the end of the existing trailers.

If it is start, then each new trailer will appear at the start, instead of the end, of the existing trailers.

If it is after, then each new trailer will appear just after the last trailer with the same <key>.

If it is before, then each new trailer will appear just before the first trailer with the same <key>.

trailer.ifexists

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there is already at least one trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: addIfDifferentNeighbor (this is the default), addIfDifferent, add, replace or doNothing.

With addIfDifferentNeighbor, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is above or below the line where the new trailer will be added.

With addIfDifferent, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is already in the input.

With add, a new trailer will be added, even if some trailers with the same (<key>, <value>) pair are already in the input.

With replace, an existing trailer with the same <key> will be deleted and the new trailer will be added. The deleted trailer will be the closest one (with the same <key>) to the place where the new one will be added.

With doNothing, nothing will be done; that is no new trailer will be added if there is already one with the same <key> in the input.

trailer.ifmissing

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there is not yet any trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: add (this is the default) and doNothing.

With add, a new trailer will be added.

With doNothing, nothing will be done.

trailer.<keyAlias>.key

Defines a <keyAlias> for the <key>. The <keyAlias> must be a prefix (case does not matter) of the <key>. For example, in git config trailer.ack.key "Acked-by" the "Acked-by" is the <key> and the "ack" is the <keyAlias>. This configuration allows the shorter --trailer "ack:..." invocation on the command line using the "ack" <keyAlias> instead of the longer --trailer "Acked-by:...".

At the end of the <key>, a separator can appear and then some space characters. By default the only valid separator is :, but this can be changed using the trailer.separators config variable.

If there is a separator in the key, then it overrides the default separator when adding the trailer.

trailer.<keyAlias>.where
This option takes the same values as the trailer.where configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.ifexists
This option takes the same values as the trailer.ifexists configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.ifmissing
This option takes the same values as the trailer.ifmissing configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.command

Deprecated in favor of trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd. This option behaves in the same way as trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd, except that it doesn't pass anything as argument to the specified command. Instead the first occurrence of substring $ARG is replaced by the <value> that would be passed as argument.

Note that $ARG in the user's command is only replaced once and that the original way of replacing $ARG is not safe.

When both trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd and trailer.<keyAlias>.command are given for the same <keyAlias>, trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd is used and trailer.<keyAlias>.command is ignored.

trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd

This option can be used to specify a shell command that will be called once to automatically add a trailer with the specified <keyAlias>, and then called each time a --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument is specified to modify the <value> of the trailer that this option would produce.

When the specified command is first called to add a trailer with the specified <keyAlias>, the behavior is as if a special --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument was added at the beginning of the "git interpret-trailers" command, where <value> is taken to be the standard output of the command with any leading and trailing whitespace trimmed off.

If some --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> arguments are also passed on the command line, the command is called again once for each of these arguments with the same <keyAlias>. And the <value> part of these arguments, if any, will be passed to the command as its first argument. This way the command can produce a <value> computed from the <value> passed in the --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument.

transfer.credentialsInUrl

A configured URL can contain plaintext credentials in the form <protocol>://<user>:<password>@<domain>/<path>. You may want to warn or forbid the use of such configuration (in favor of using the section called “git-credential(1)”). This will be used on the section called “git-clone(1)”, the section called “git-fetch(1)”, the section called “git-push(1)”, and any other direct use of the configured URL.

Note that this is currently limited to detecting credentials in remote.<name>.url configuration; it won't detect credentials in remote.<name>.pushurl configuration.

You might want to enable this to prevent inadvertent credentials exposure, e.g. because:

  • The OS or system where you're running git may not provide a way or otherwise allow you to configure the permissions of the configuration file where the username and/or password are stored.
  • Even if it does, having such data stored "at rest" might expose you in other ways, e.g. a backup process might copy the data to another system.
  • The git programs will pass the full URL to one another as arguments on the command-line, meaning the credentials will be exposed to other unprivileged users on systems that allow them to see the full process list of other users. On linux the "hidepid" setting documented in procfs(5) allows for configuring this behavior.

    If such concerns don't apply to you then you probably don't need to be concerned about credentials exposure due to storing sensitive data in git's configuration files. If you do want to use this, set transfer.credentialsInUrl to one of these values:

  • allow (default): Git will proceed with its activity without warning.
  • warn: Git will write a warning message to stderr when parsing a URL with a plaintext credential.
  • die: Git will write a failure message to stderr when parsing a URL with a plaintext credential.
transfer.fsckObjects

When fetch.fsckObjects or receive.fsckObjects are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. Defaults to false.

When set, the fetch or receive will abort in the case of a malformed object or a link to a nonexistent object. In addition, various other issues are checked for, including legacy issues (see fsck.<msg-id>), and potential security issues like the existence of a .GIT directory or a malicious .gitmodules file (see the release notes for v2.2.1 and v2.17.1 for details). Other sanity and security checks may be added in future releases.

On the receiving side, failing fsckObjects will make those objects unreachable, see "QUARANTINE ENVIRONMENT" in the section called “git-receive-pack(1)”. On the fetch side, malformed objects will instead be left unreferenced in the repository.

Due to the non-quarantine nature of the fetch.fsckObjects implementation it cannot be relied upon to leave the object store clean like receive.fsckObjects can.

As objects are unpacked they're written to the object store, so there can be cases where malicious objects get introduced even though the "fetch" failed, only to have a subsequent "fetch" succeed because only new incoming objects are checked, not those that have already been written to the object store. That difference in behavior should not be relied upon. In the future, such objects may be quarantined for "fetch" as well.

For now, the paranoid need to find some way to emulate the quarantine environment if they'd like the same protection as "push". E.g. in the case of an internal mirror do the mirroring in two steps, one to fetch the untrusted objects, and then do a second "push" (which will use the quarantine) to another internal repo, and have internal clients consume this pushed-to repository, or embargo internal fetches and only allow them once a full "fsck" has run (and no new fetches have happened in the meantime).

transfer.hideRefs

String(s) receive-pack and upload-pack use to decide which refs to omit from their initial advertisements. Use more than one definition to specify multiple prefix strings. A ref that is under the hierarchies listed in the value of this variable is excluded, and is hidden when responding to git push or git fetch. See receive.hideRefs and uploadpack.hideRefs for program-specific versions of this config.

You may also include a ! in front of the ref name to negate the entry, explicitly exposing it, even if an earlier entry marked it as hidden. If you have multiple hideRefs values, later entries override earlier ones (and entries in more-specific config files override less-specific ones).

If a namespace is in use, the namespace prefix is stripped from each reference before it is matched against transfer.hiderefs patterns. In order to match refs before stripping, add a ^ in front of the ref name. If you combine ! and ^, ! must be specified first.

For example, if refs/heads/master is specified in transfer.hideRefs and the current namespace is foo, then refs/namespaces/foo/refs/heads/master is omitted from the advertisements. If uploadpack.allowRefInWant is set, upload-pack will treat want-ref refs/heads/master in a protocol v2 fetch command as if refs/namespaces/foo/refs/heads/master did not exist. receive-pack, on the other hand, will still advertise the object id the ref is pointing to without mentioning its name (a so-called ".have" line).

Even if you hide refs, a client may still be able to steal the target objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” man page; it's best to keep private data in a separate repository.

transfer.unpackLimit
When fetch.unpackLimit or receive.unpackLimit are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. The default value is 100.
transfer.advertiseSID
Boolean. When true, client and server processes will advertise their unique session IDs to their remote counterpart. Defaults to false.
transfer.bundleURI
When true, local git clone commands will request bundle information from the remote server (if advertised) and download bundles before continuing the clone through the Git protocol. Defaults to false.
transfer.advertiseObjectInfo
When true, the object-info capability is advertised by servers. Defaults to false.
uploadarchive.allowUnreachable
If true, allow clients to use git archive --remote to request any tree, whether reachable from the ref tips or not. See the discussion in the "SECURITY" section of the section called “git-upload-archive(1)” for more details. Defaults to false.
uploadpack.hideRefs
This variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to upload-pack (and so affects only fetches, not pushes). An attempt to fetch a hidden ref by git fetch will fail. See also uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant.
uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant
When uploadpack.hideRefs is in effect, allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object at the tip of a hidden ref (by default, such a request is rejected). See also uploadpack.hideRefs. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” man page; it's best to keep private data in a separate repository.
uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant
Allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object that is reachable from any ref tip. However, note that calculating object reachability is computationally expensive. Defaults to false. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” man page; it's best to keep private data in a separate repository.
uploadpack.allowAnySHA1InWant
Allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for any object at all. It implies uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant and uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant. If set to true it will enable both of them, it set to false it will disable both of them. By default not set.
uploadpack.keepAlive
When upload-pack has started pack-objects, there may be a quiet period while pack-objects prepares the pack. Normally it would output progress information, but if --quiet was used for the fetch, pack-objects will output nothing at all until the pack data begins. Some clients and networks may consider the server to be hung and give up. Setting this option instructs upload-pack to send an empty keepalive packet every uploadpack.keepAlive seconds. Setting this option to 0 disables keepalive packets entirely. The default is 5 seconds.
uploadpack.packObjectsHook

If this option is set, when upload-pack would run git pack-objects to create a packfile for a client, it will run this shell command instead. The pack-objects command and arguments it would have run (including the git pack-objects at the beginning) are appended to the shell command. The stdin and stdout of the hook are treated as if pack-objects itself was run. I.e., upload-pack will feed input intended for pack-objects to the hook, and expects a completed packfile on stdout.

Note that this configuration variable is only respected when it is specified in protected configuration (see the section called “SCOPES”). This is a safety measure against fetching from untrusted repositories.

uploadpack.allowFilter
If this option is set, upload-pack will support partial clone and partial fetch object filtering.
uploadpackfilter.allow
Provides a default value for unspecified object filters (see: the below configuration variable). If set to true, this will also enable all filters which get added in the future. Defaults to true.
uploadpackfilter.<filter>.allow
Explicitly allow or ban the object filter corresponding to <filter>, where <filter> may be one of: blob:none, blob:limit, object:type, tree, sparse:oid, or combine. If using combined filters, both combine and all of the nested filter kinds must be allowed. Defaults to uploadpackfilter.allow.
uploadpackfilter.tree.maxDepth
Only allow --filter=tree:<n> when <n> is no more than the value of uploadpackfilter.tree.maxDepth. If set, this also implies uploadpackfilter.tree.allow=true, unless this configuration variable had already been set. Has no effect if unset.
uploadpack.allowRefInWant
If this option is set, upload-pack will support the ref-in-want feature of the protocol version 2 fetch command. This feature is intended for the benefit of load-balanced servers which may not have the same view of what OIDs their refs point to due to replication delay.
url.<base>.insteadOf

Any URL that starts with this value will be rewritten to start, instead, with <base>. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories, and serves them with multiple access methods, and some users need to use different access methods, this feature allows people to specify any of the equivalent URLs and have Git automatically rewrite the URL to the best alternative for the particular user, even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one insteadOf strings match a given URL, the longest match is used.

Note that any protocol restrictions will be applied to the rewritten URL. If the rewrite changes the URL to use a custom protocol or remote helper, you may need to adjust the protocol.*.allow config to permit the request. In particular, protocols you expect to use for submodules must be set to always rather than the default of user. See the description of protocol.allow above.

url.<base>.pushInsteadOf
Any URL that starts with this value will not be pushed to; instead, it will be rewritten to start with <base>, and the resulting URL will be pushed to. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories, and serves them with multiple access methods, some of which do not allow push, this feature allows people to specify a pull-only URL and have Git automatically use an appropriate URL to push, even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one pushInsteadOf strings match a given URL, the longest match is used. If a remote has an explicit pushurl, Git will ignore this setting for that remote.
user.name , user.email , author.name , author.email , committer.name , committer.email

The user.name and user.email variables determine what ends up in the author and committer fields of commit objects. If you need the author or committer to be different, the author.name, author.email, committer.name, or committer.email variables can be set. All of these can be overridden by the GIT_AUTHOR_NAME, GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME, GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL, and EMAIL environment variables.

Note that the name forms of these variables conventionally refer to some form of a personal name. See the section called “git-commit(1)” and the environment variables section of the section called “git(1)” for more information on these settings and the credential.username option if you're looking for authentication credentials instead.

user.useConfigOnly
Instruct Git to avoid trying to guess defaults for user.email and user.name, and instead retrieve the values only from the configuration. For example, if you have multiple email addresses and would like to use a different one for each repository, then with this configuration option set to true in the global config along with a name, Git will prompt you to set up an email before making new commits in a newly cloned repository. Defaults to false.
user.signingKey
If the section called “git-tag(1)” or the section called “git-commit(1)” is not selecting the key you want it to automatically when creating a signed tag or commit, you can override the default selection with this variable. This option is passed unchanged to gpg's --local-user parameter, so you may specify a key using any method that gpg supports. If gpg.format is set to ssh this can contain the path to either your private ssh key or the public key when ssh-agent is used. Alternatively it can contain a public key prefixed with key:: directly (e.g.: "key::ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier"). The private key needs to be available via ssh-agent. If not set Git will call gpg.ssh.defaultKeyCommand (e.g.: "ssh-add -L") and try to use the first key available. For backward compatibility, a raw key which begins with "ssh-", such as "ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier", is treated as "key::ssh-rsa XXXXXX identifier", but this form is deprecated; use the key:: form instead.
versionsort.prereleaseSuffix (deprecated)
Deprecated alias for versionsort.suffix. Ignored if versionsort.suffix is set.
versionsort.suffix

Even when version sort is used in the section called “git-tag(1)”, tagnames with the same base version but different suffixes are still sorted lexicographically, resulting e.g. in prerelease tags appearing after the main release (e.g. "1.0-rc1" after "1.0"). This variable can be specified to determine the sorting order of tags with different suffixes.

By specifying a single suffix in this variable, any tagname containing that suffix will appear before the corresponding main release. E.g. if the variable is set to "-rc", then all "1.0-rcX" tags will appear before "1.0". If specified multiple times, once per suffix, then the order of suffixes in the configuration will determine the sorting order of tagnames with those suffixes. E.g. if "-pre" appears before "-rc" in the configuration, then all "1.0-preX" tags will be listed before any "1.0-rcX" tags. The placement of the main release tag relative to tags with various suffixes can be determined by specifying the empty suffix among those other suffixes. E.g. if the suffixes "-rc", "", "-ck", and "-bfs" appear in the configuration in this order, then all "v4.8-rcX" tags are listed first, followed by "v4.8", then "v4.8-ckX" and finally "v4.8-bfsX".

If more than one suffix matches the same tagname, then that tagname will be sorted according to the suffix which starts at the earliest position in the tagname. If more than one different matching suffix starts at that earliest position, then that tagname will be sorted according to the longest of those suffixes. The sorting order between different suffixes is undefined if they are in multiple config files.

web.browser
Specify a web browser that may be used by some commands. Currently only the section called “git-instaweb(1)” and the section called “git-help(1)” may use it.
worktree.guessRemote
If no branch is specified and neither -b nor -B nor --detach is used, then git worktree add defaults to creating a new branch from HEAD. If worktree.guessRemote is set to true, worktree add tries to find a remote-tracking branch whose name uniquely matches the new branch name. If such a branch exists, it is checked out and set as "upstream" for the new branch. If no such match can be found, it falls back to creating a new branch from the current HEAD.
worktree.useRelativePaths

Link worktrees using relative paths (when "true") or absolute paths (when "false"). This is particularly useful for setups where the repository and worktrees may be moved between different locations or environments. Defaults to "false".

Note that setting worktree.useRelativePaths to "true" implies enabling the extension.relativeWorktrees config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), thus making it incompatible with older versions of Git.

BUGS

When using the deprecated [section.subsection] syntax, changing a value will result in adding a multi-line key instead of a change, if the subsection is given with at least one uppercase character. For example when the config looks like

  [section.subsection]
    key = value1

and running git config section.Subsection.key value2 will result in

  [section.subsection]
    key = value1
    key = value2

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-count-objects(1)

NAME

git-count-objects - Count unpacked number of objects and their disk consumption

SYNOPSIS

git count-objects [-v] [-H | --human-readable]

DESCRIPTION

Counts the number of unpacked object files and disk space consumed by them, to help you decide when it is a good time to repack.

OPTIONS

-v , --verbose

Provide more detailed reports:

count: the number of loose objects

size: disk space consumed by loose objects, in KiB (unless -H is specified)

in-pack: the number of in-pack objects

size-pack: disk space consumed by the packs, in KiB (unless -H is specified)

prune-packable: the number of loose objects that are also present in the packs. These objects could be pruned using git prune-packed.

garbage: the number of files in the object database that are neither valid loose objects nor valid packs

size-garbage: disk space consumed by garbage files, in KiB (unless -H is specified)

alternate: absolute path of alternate object databases; may appear multiple times, one line per path. Note that if the path contains non-printable characters, it may be surrounded by double-quotes and contain C-style backslashed escape sequences.

-H , --human-readable
Print sizes in human readable format

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-credential(1)

NAME

git-credential - Retrieve and store user credentials

SYNOPSIS

'git credential' (fill|approve|reject|capability)

DESCRIPTION

Git has an internal interface for storing and retrieving credentials from system-specific helpers, as well as prompting the user for usernames and passwords. The git-credential command exposes this interface to scripts which may want to retrieve, store, or prompt for credentials in the same manner as Git. The design of this scriptable interface models the internal C API; see credential.h for more background on the concepts.

git-credential takes an "action" option on the command-line (one of fill, approve, or reject) and reads a credential description on stdin (see INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT).

If the action is fill, git-credential will attempt to add "username" and "password" attributes to the description by reading config files, by contacting any configured credential helpers, or by prompting the user. The username and password attributes of the credential description are then printed to stdout together with the attributes already provided.

If the action is approve, git-credential will send the description to any configured credential helpers, which may store the credential for later use.

If the action is reject, git-credential will send the description to any configured credential helpers, which may erase any stored credentials matching the description.

If the action is capability, git-credential will announce any capabilities it supports to standard output.

If the action is approve or reject, no output should be emitted.

TYPICAL USE OF GIT CREDENTIAL

An application using git-credential will typically use git credential following these steps:

  1. Generate a credential description based on the context.

    For example, if we want a password for https://example.com/foo.git, we might generate the following credential description (don't forget the blank line at the end; it tells git credential that the application finished feeding all the information it has):

    protocol=https
    host=example.com
    path=foo.git
  2. Ask git-credential to give us a username and password for this description. This is done by running git credential fill, feeding the description from step (1) to its standard input. The complete credential description (including the credential per se, i.e. the login and password) will be produced on standard output, like:

    protocol=https
    host=example.com
    username=bob
    password=secr3t

    In most cases, this means the attributes given in the input will be repeated in the output, but Git may also modify the credential description, for example by removing the path attribute when the protocol is HTTP(s) and credential.useHttpPath is false.

    If the git credential knew about the password, this step may not have involved the user actually typing this password (the user may have typed a password to unlock the keychain instead, or no user interaction was done if the keychain was already unlocked) before it returned password=secr3t.

  3. Use the credential (e.g., access the URL with the username and password from step (2)), and see if it's accepted.
  4. Report on the success or failure of the password. If the credential allowed the operation to complete successfully, then it can be marked with an "approve" action to tell git credential to reuse it in its next invocation. If the credential was rejected during the operation, use the "reject" action so that git credential will ask for a new password in its next invocation. In either case, git credential should be fed with the credential description obtained from step (2) (which also contains the fields provided in step (1)).

INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT

git credential reads and/or writes (depending on the action used) credential information in its standard input/output. This information can correspond either to keys for which git credential will obtain the login information (e.g. host, protocol, path), or to the actual credential data to be obtained (username/password).

The credential is split into a set of named attributes, with one attribute per line. Each attribute is specified by a key-value pair, separated by an = (equals) sign, followed by a newline.

The key may contain any bytes except =, newline, or NUL. The value may contain any bytes except newline or NUL. A line, including the trailing newline, may not exceed 65535 bytes in order to allow implementations to parse efficiently.

Attributes with keys that end with C-style array brackets [] can have multiple values. Each instance of a multi-valued attribute forms an ordered list of values - the order of the repeated attributes defines the order of the values. An empty multi-valued attribute (key[]=\n) acts to clear any previous entries and reset the list.

In all cases, all bytes are treated as-is (i.e., there is no quoting, and one cannot transmit a value with newline or NUL in it). The list of attributes is terminated by a blank line or end-of-file.

Git understands the following attributes:

protocol
The protocol over which the credential will be used (e.g., https).
host
The remote hostname for a network credential. This includes the port number if one was specified (e.g., "example.com:8088").
path
The path with which the credential will be used. E.g., for accessing a remote https repository, this will be the repository's path on the server.
username
The credential's username, if we already have one (e.g., from a URL, the configuration, the user, or from a previously run helper).
password
The credential's password, if we are asking it to be stored.
password_expiry_utc
Generated passwords such as an OAuth access token may have an expiry date. When reading credentials from helpers, git credential fill ignores expired passwords. Represented as Unix time UTC, seconds since 1970.
oauth_refresh_token
An OAuth refresh token may accompany a password that is an OAuth access token. Helpers must treat this attribute as confidential like the password attribute. Git itself has no special behaviour for this attribute.
url

When this special attribute is read by git credential, the value is parsed as a URL and treated as if its constituent parts were read (e.g., url=https://example.com would behave as if protocol=https and host=example.com had been provided). This can help callers avoid parsing URLs themselves.

Note that specifying a protocol is mandatory and if the URL doesn't specify a hostname (e.g., "cert:///path/to/file") the credential will contain a hostname attribute whose value is an empty string.

Components which are missing from the URL (e.g., there is no username in the example above) will be left unset.

authtype

This indicates that the authentication scheme in question should be used. Common values for HTTP and HTTPS include basic, bearer, and digest, although the latter is insecure and should not be used. If credential is used, this may be set to an arbitrary string suitable for the protocol in question (usually HTTP).

This value should not be sent unless the appropriate capability (see below) is provided on input.

credential

The pre-encoded credential, suitable for the protocol in question (usually HTTP). If this key is sent, authtype is mandatory, and username and password are not used. For HTTP, Git concatenates the authtype value and this value with a single space to determine the Authorization header.

This value should not be sent unless the appropriate capability (see below) is provided on input.

ephemeral

This boolean value indicates, if true, that the value in the credential field should not be saved by the credential helper because its usefulness is limited in time. For example, an HTTP Digest credential value is computed using a nonce and reusing it will not result in successful authentication. This may also be used for situations with short duration (e.g., 24-hour) credentials. The default value is false.

The credential helper will still be invoked with store or erase so that it can determine whether the operation was successful.

This value should not be sent unless the appropriate capability (see below) is provided on input.

state[]

This value provides an opaque state that will be passed back to this helper if it is called again. Each different credential helper may specify this once. The value should include a prefix unique to the credential helper and should ignore values that don't match its prefix.

This value should not be sent unless the appropriate capability (see below) is provided on input.

continue

This is a boolean value, which, if enabled, indicates that this authentication is a non-final part of a multistage authentication step. This is common in protocols such as NTLM and Kerberos, where two rounds of client authentication are required, and setting this flag allows the credential helper to implement the multistage authentication step. This flag should only be sent if a further stage is required; that is, if another round of authentication is expected.

This value should not be sent unless the appropriate capability (see below) is provided on input. This attribute is one-way from a credential helper to pass information to Git (or other programs invoking git credential).

wwwauth[]

When an HTTP response is received by Git that includes one or more WWW-Authenticate authentication headers, these will be passed by Git to credential helpers.

Each WWW-Authenticate header value is passed as a multi-valued attribute wwwauth[], where the order of the attributes is the same as they appear in the HTTP response. This attribute is one-way from Git to pass additional information to credential helpers.

capability[]

This signals that Git, or the helper, as appropriate, supports the capability in question. This can be used to provide better, more specific data as part of the protocol. A capability[] directive must precede any value depending on it and these directives should be the first item announced in the protocol.

There are two currently supported capabilities. The first is authtype, which indicates that the authtype, credential, and ephemeral values are understood. The second is state, which indicates that the state[] and continue values are understood.

It is not obligatory to use the additional features just because the capability is supported, but they should not be provided without the capability.

Unrecognised attributes and capabilities are silently discarded.

CAPABILITY INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT

For git credential capability, the format is slightly different. First, a version 0 announcement is made to indicate the current version of the protocol, and then each capability is announced with a line like capability authtype. Credential helpers may also implement this format, again with the capability argument. Additional lines may be added in the future; callers should ignore lines which they don't understand.

Because this is a new part of the credential helper protocol, older versions of Git, as well as some credential helpers, may not support it. If a non-zero exit status is received, or if the first line doesn't start with the word version and a space, callers should assume that no capabilities are supported.

The intention of this format is to differentiate it from the credential output in an unambiguous way. It is possible to use very simple credential helpers (e.g., inline shell scripts) which always produce identical output. Using a distinct format allows users to continue to use this syntax without having to worry about correctly implementing capability advertisements or accidentally confusing callers querying for capabilities.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-credential-cache--daemon(1)

NAME

git-credential-cache--daemon - Temporarily store user credentials in memory

SYNOPSIS

git credential-cache--daemon [--debug] <socket-path>

DESCRIPTION

Note

You probably don't want to invoke this command yourself; it is started automatically when you use the section called “git-credential-cache(1)”.

This command listens on the Unix domain socket specified by <socket-path> for git-credential-cache clients. Clients may store and retrieve credentials. Each credential is held for a timeout specified by the client; once no credentials are held, the daemon exits.

If the --debug option is specified, the daemon does not close its stderr stream, and may output extra diagnostics to it even after it has begun listening for clients.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-credential-cache(1)

NAME

git-credential-cache - Helper to temporarily store passwords in memory

SYNOPSIS

git config credential.helper 'cache [<options>]'

DESCRIPTION

This command caches credentials for use by future Git programs. The stored credentials are kept in memory of the cache-daemon process (instead of being written to a file) and are forgotten after a configurable timeout. Credentials are forgotten sooner if the cache-daemon dies, for example if the system restarts. The cache is accessible over a Unix domain socket, restricted to the current user by filesystem permissions.

You probably don't want to invoke this command directly; it is meant to be used as a credential helper by other parts of Git. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” or EXAMPLES below.

OPTIONS

--timeout <seconds>
Number of seconds to cache credentials (default: 900).
--socket <path>
Use <path> to contact a running cache daemon (or start a new cache daemon if one is not started). Defaults to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/git/credential/socket unless ~/.git-credential-cache/ exists in which case ~/.git-credential-cache/socket is used instead. If your home directory is on a network-mounted filesystem, you may need to change this to a local filesystem. You must specify an absolute path.

CONTROLLING THE DAEMON

If you would like the daemon to exit early, forgetting all cached credentials before their timeout, you can issue an exit action:

git credential-cache exit

EXAMPLES

The point of this helper is to reduce the number of times you must type your username or password. For example:

$ git config credential.helper cache
$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
Username: <type your username>
Password: <type your password>

[work for 5 more minutes]
$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
[your credentials are used automatically]

You can provide options via the credential.helper configuration variable (this example increases the cache time to 1 hour):

$ git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'

PERSONAL ACCESS TOKENS

Some remotes accept personal access tokens, which are randomly generated and hard to memorise. They typically have a lifetime of weeks or months.

git-credential-cache is inherently unsuitable for persistent storage of personal access tokens. The credential will be forgotten after the cache timeout. Even if you configure a long timeout, credentials will be forgotten if the daemon dies.

To avoid frequently regenerating personal access tokens, configure a credential helper with persistent storage. Alternatively, configure an OAuth credential helper to generate credentials automatically. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)”, sections "Available helpers" and "OAuth".

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-credential-store(1)

NAME

git-credential-store - Helper to store credentials on disk

SYNOPSIS

git config credential.helper 'store [<options>]'

DESCRIPTION

Note

Using this helper will store your passwords unencrypted on disk, protected only by filesystem permissions. If this is not an acceptable security tradeoff, try the section called “git-credential-cache(1)”, or find a helper that integrates with secure storage provided by your operating system.

This command stores credentials indefinitely on disk for use by future Git programs.

You probably don't want to invoke this command directly; it is meant to be used as a credential helper by other parts of git. See the section called “gitcredentials(7)” or EXAMPLES below.

OPTIONS

--file=<path>
Use <path> to lookup and store credentials. The file will have its filesystem permissions set to prevent other users on the system from reading it, but it will not be encrypted or otherwise protected. If not specified, credentials will be searched for from ~/.git-credentials and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/credentials, and credentials will be written to ~/.git-credentials if it exists, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/credentials if it exists and the former does not. See also the section called “FILES”.

FILES

If not set explicitly with --file, there are two files where git-credential-store will search for credentials in order of precedence:

~/.git-credentials
User-specific credentials file.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/credentials
Second user-specific credentials file. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/credentials will be used. Any credentials stored in this file will not be used if ~/.git-credentials has a matching credential as well. It is a good idea not to create this file if you sometimes use older versions of Git that do not support it.

For credential lookups, the files are read in the order given above, with the first matching credential found taking precedence over credentials found in files further down the list.

Credential storage will by default write to the first existing file in the list. If none of these files exist, ~/.git-credentials will be created and written to.

When erasing credentials, matching credentials will be erased from all files.

EXAMPLES

The point of this helper is to reduce the number of times you must type your username or password. For example:

$ git config credential.helper store
$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
Username: <type your username>
Password: <type your password>

[several days later]
$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
[your credentials are used automatically]

STORAGE FORMAT

The .git-credentials file is stored in plaintext. Each credential is stored on its own line as a URL like:

https://user:pass@example.com

No other kinds of lines (e.g. empty lines or comment lines) are allowed in the file, even though some may be silently ignored. Do not view or edit the file with editors.

When Git needs authentication for a particular URL context, credential-store will consider that context a pattern to match against each entry in the credentials file. If the protocol, hostname, and username (if we already have one) match, then the password is returned to Git. See the discussion of configuration in the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for more information.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cvsexportcommit(1)

NAME

git-cvsexportcommit - Export a single commit to a CVS checkout

SYNOPSIS

git cvsexportcommit [-h] [-u] [-v] [-c] [-P] [-p] [-a] [-d <cvsroot>]
        [-w <cvs-workdir>] [-W] [-f] [-m <msgprefix>] [<parent-commit>] <commit-id>

DESCRIPTION

Exports a commit from Git to a CVS checkout, making it easier to merge patches from a Git repository into a CVS repository.

Specify the name of a CVS checkout using the -w switch or execute it from the root of the CVS working copy. In the latter case GIT_DIR must be defined. See examples below.

It does its best to do the safe thing, it will check that the files are unchanged and up to date in the CVS checkout, and it will not autocommit by default.

Supports file additions, removals, and commits that affect binary files.

If the commit is a merge commit, you must tell git cvsexportcommit what parent the changeset should be done against.

OPTIONS

-c
Commit automatically if the patch applied cleanly. It will not commit if any hunks fail to apply or there were other problems.
-p
Be pedantic (paranoid) when applying patches. Invokes patch with --fuzz=0
-a
Add authorship information. Adds Author line, and Committer (if different from Author) to the message.
-d
Set an alternative CVSROOT to use. This corresponds to the CVS -d parameter. Usually users will not want to set this, except if using CVS in an asymmetric fashion.
-f
Force the merge even if the files are not up to date.
-P
Force the parent commit, even if it is not a direct parent.
-m
Prepend the commit message with the provided prefix. Useful for patch series and the like.
-u
Update affected files from CVS repository before attempting export.
-k
Reverse CVS keyword expansion (e.g. $Revision: 1.2.3.4$ becomes $Revision$) in working CVS checkout before applying patch.
-w
Specify the location of the CVS checkout to use for the export. This option does not require GIT_DIR to be set before execution if the current directory is within a Git repository. The default is the value of cvsexportcommit.cvsdir.
-W
Tell cvsexportcommit that the current working directory is not only a Git checkout, but also the CVS checkout. Therefore, Git will reset the working directory to the parent commit before proceeding.
-v
Verbose.

CONFIGURATION

cvsexportcommit.cvsdir
The default location of the CVS checkout to use for the export.

EXAMPLES

Merge one patch into CVS
$ export GIT_DIR=~/project/.git
$ cd ~/project_cvs_checkout
$ git cvsexportcommit -v <commit-sha1>
$ cvs commit -F .msg <files>
Merge one patch into CVS (-c and -w options). The working directory is within the Git Repo
        $ git cvsexportcommit -v -c -w ~/project_cvs_checkout <commit-sha1>
Merge pending patches into CVS automatically -- only if you really know what you are doing
$ export GIT_DIR=~/project/.git
$ cd ~/project_cvs_checkout
$ git cherry cvshead myhead | sed -n 's/^+ //p' | xargs -l1 git cvsexportcommit -c -p -v

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cvsimport(1)

NAME

git-cvsimport - Salvage your data out of another SCM people love to hate

SYNOPSIS

git cvsimport [-o <branch-for-HEAD>] [-h] [-v] [-d <CVSROOT>]
              [-A <author-conv-file>] [-p <options-for-cvsps>] [-P <file>]
              [-C <git-repository>] [-z <fuzz>] [-i] [-k] [-u] [-s <subst>]
              [-a] [-m] [-M <regex>] [-S <regex>] [-L <commit-limit>]
              [-r <remote>] [-R] [<CVS-module>]

DESCRIPTION

WARNING: git cvsimport uses cvsps version 2, which is considered deprecated; it does not work with cvsps version 3 and later. If you are performing a one-shot import of a CVS repository consider using cvs2git or cvs-fast-export.

Imports a CVS repository into Git. It will either create a new repository, or incrementally import into an existing one.

Splitting the CVS log into patch sets is done by cvsps. At least version 2.1 is required.

WARNING: for certain situations the import leads to incorrect results. Please see the section ISSUES for further reference.

You should never do any work of your own on the branches that are created by git cvsimport. By default initial import will create and populate a "master" branch from the CVS repository's main branch which you're free to work with; after that, you need to git merge incremental imports, or any CVS branches, yourself. It is advisable to specify a named remote via -r to separate and protect the incoming branches.

If you intend to set up a shared public repository that all developers can read/write, or if you want to use the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”, then you probably want to make a bare clone of the imported repository, and use the clone as the shared repository. See the section called “gitcvs-migration(7)”.

OPTIONS

-v
Verbosity: let cvsimport report what it is doing.
-d <CVSROOT>
The root of the CVS archive. May be local (a simple path) or remote; currently, only the :local:, :ext: and :pserver: access methods are supported. If not given, git cvsimport will try to read it from CVS/Root. If no such file exists, it checks for the CVSROOT environment variable.
<CVS-module>
The CVS module you want to import. Relative to <CVSROOT>. If not given, git cvsimport tries to read it from CVS/Repository.
-C <target-dir>
The Git repository to import to. If the directory doesn't exist, it will be created. Default is the current directory.
-r <remote>
The Git remote to import this CVS repository into. Moves all CVS branches into remotes/<remote>/<branch> akin to the way git clone uses origin by default.
-o <branch-for-HEAD>

When no remote is specified (via -r) the HEAD branch from CVS is imported to the origin branch within the Git repository, as HEAD already has a special meaning for Git. When a remote is specified the HEAD branch is named remotes/<remote>/master mirroring git clone behaviour. Use this option if you want to import into a different branch.

Use -o master for continuing an import that was initially done by the old cvs2git tool.

-i
Import-only: don't perform a checkout after importing. This option ensures the working directory and index remain untouched and will not create them if they do not exist.
-k
Kill keywords: will extract files with -kk from the CVS archive to avoid noisy changesets. Highly recommended, but off by default to preserve compatibility with early imported trees.
-u
Convert underscores in tag and branch names to dots.
-s <subst>
Substitute the character "/" in branch names with <subst>
-p <options-for-cvsps>

Additional options for cvsps. The options -u and -A are implicit and should not be used here.

If you need to pass multiple options, separate them with a comma.

-z <fuzz>
Pass the timestamp fuzz factor to cvsps, in seconds. If unset, cvsps defaults to 300s.
-P <cvsps-output-file>
Instead of calling cvsps, read the provided cvsps output file. Useful for debugging or when cvsps is being handled outside cvsimport.
-m
Attempt to detect merges based on the commit message. This option will enable default regexes that try to capture the source branch name from the commit message.
-M <regex>

Attempt to detect merges based on the commit message with a custom regex. It can be used with -m to enable the default regexes as well. You must escape forward slashes.

The regex must capture the source branch name in $1.

This option can be used several times to provide several detection regexes.

-S <regex>
Skip paths matching the regex.
-a
Import all commits, including recent ones. cvsimport by default skips commits that have a timestamp less than 10 minutes ago.
-L <limit>
Limit the number of commits imported. Workaround for cases where cvsimport leaks memory.
-A <author-conv-file>

CVS by default uses the Unix username when writing its commit logs. Using this option and an author-conv-file maps the name recorded in CVS to author name, e-mail and optional time zone:

        exon=Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
        spawn=Simon Pawn <spawn@frog-pond.org> America/Chicago

git cvsimport will make it appear as those authors had their GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL set properly all along. If a time zone is specified, GIT_AUTHOR_DATE will have the corresponding offset applied.

For convenience, this data is saved to $GIT_DIR/cvs-authors each time the -A option is provided and read from that same file each time git cvsimport is run.

It is not recommended to use this feature if you intend to export changes back to CVS again later with git cvsexportcommit.

-R

Generate a $GIT_DIR/cvs-revisions file containing a mapping from CVS revision numbers to newly-created Git commit IDs. The generated file will contain one line for each (filename, revision) pair imported; each line will look like

src/widget.c 1.1 1d862f173cdc7325b6fa6d2ae1cfd61fd1b512b7

The revision data is appended to the file if it already exists, for use when doing incremental imports.

This option may be useful if you have CVS revision numbers stored in commit messages, bug-tracking systems, email archives, and the like.

-h
Print a short usage message and exit.

OUTPUT

If -v is specified, the script reports what it is doing.

Otherwise, success is indicated the Unix way, i.e. by simply exiting with a zero exit status.

ISSUES

Problems related to timestamps:

  • If timestamps of commits in the CVS repository are not stable enough to be used for ordering commits changes may show up in the wrong order.
  • If any files were ever "cvs import"ed more than once (e.g., import of more than one vendor release) the HEAD contains the wrong content.
  • If the timestamp order of different files cross the revision order within the commit matching time window the order of commits may be wrong.

Problems related to branches:

  • Branches on which no commits have been made are not imported.
  • All files from the branching point are added to a branch even if never added in CVS.
  • This applies to files added to the source branch after a daughter branch was created: if previously no commit was made on the daughter branch they will erroneously be added to the daughter branch in git.

Problems related to tags:

  • Multiple tags on the same revision are not imported.

If you suspect that any of these issues may apply to the repository you want to import, consider using cvs2git:

  • cvs2git (part of cvs2svn), https://subversion.apache.org/

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-cvsserver(1)

NAME

git-cvsserver - A CVS server emulator for Git

SYNOPSIS

SSH:

export CVS_SERVER="git cvsserver"
cvs -d :ext:user@server/path/repo.git co <HEAD_name>

pserver (/etc/inetd.conf):

cvspserver stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/git-cvsserver git-cvsserver pserver

Usage:

git-cvsserver [<options>] [pserver|server] [<directory> …]

DESCRIPTION

This application is a CVS emulation layer for Git.

It is highly functional. However, not all methods are implemented, and for those methods that are implemented, not all switches are implemented.

Testing has been done using both the CLI CVS client, and the Eclipse CVS plugin. Most functionality works fine with both of these clients.

OPTIONS

All these options obviously only make sense if enforced by the server side. They have been implemented to resemble the the section called “git-daemon(1)” options as closely as possible.

--base-path <path>
Prepend path to requested CVSROOT
--strict-paths
Don't allow recursing into subdirectories
--export-all
Don't check for gitcvs.enabled in config. You also have to specify a list of allowed directories (see below) if you want to use this option.
-V , --version
Print version information and exit
-h , -H , --help
Print usage information and exit
<directory>
The remaining arguments provide a list of directories. If no directories are given, then all are allowed. Repositories within these directories still require the gitcvs.enabled config option, unless --export-all is specified.

LIMITATIONS

CVS clients cannot tag, branch or perform Git merges.

git-cvsserver maps Git branches to CVS modules. This is very different from what most CVS users would expect since in CVS modules usually represent one or more directories.

INSTALLATION

  1. If you are going to offer CVS access via pserver, add a line in /etc/inetd.conf like

       cvspserver stream tcp nowait nobody git-cvsserver pserver

    Note: Some inetd servers let you specify the name of the executable independently of the value of argv[0] (i.e. the name the program assumes it was executed with). In this case the correct line in /etc/inetd.conf looks like

       cvspserver stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/git-cvsserver git-cvsserver pserver

    Only anonymous access is provided by pserver by default. To commit you will have to create pserver accounts, simply add a gitcvs.authdb setting in the config file of the repositories you want the cvsserver to allow writes to, for example:

       [gitcvs]
            authdb = /etc/cvsserver/passwd

    The format of these files is username followed by the encrypted password, for example:

       myuser:sqkNi8zPf01HI
       myuser:$1$9K7FzU28$VfF6EoPYCJEYcVQwATgOP/
       myuser:$5$.NqmNH1vwfzGpV8B$znZIcumu1tNLATgV2l6e1/mY8RzhUDHMOaVOeL1cxV3

    You can use the htpasswd facility that comes with Apache to make these files, but only with the -d option (or -B if your system supports it).

    Preferably use the system specific utility that manages password hash creation in your platform (e.g. mkpasswd in Linux, encrypt in OpenBSD or pwhash in NetBSD) and paste it in the right location.

    Then provide your password via the pserver method, for example:

       cvs -d:pserver:someuser:somepassword@server:/path/repo.git co <HEAD_name>

    No special setup is needed for SSH access, other than having Git tools in the PATH. If you have clients that do not accept the CVS_SERVER environment variable, you can rename git-cvsserver to cvs.

    Note: Newer CVS versions (>= 1.12.11) also support specifying CVS_SERVER directly in CVSROOT like

       cvs -d ":ext;CVS_SERVER=git cvsserver:user@server/path/repo.git" co <HEAD_name>

    This has the advantage that it will be saved in your CVS/Root files and you don't need to worry about always setting the correct environment variable. SSH users restricted to git-shell don't need to override the default with CVS_SERVER (and shouldn't) as git-shell understands cvs to mean git-cvsserver and pretends that the other end runs the real cvs better.

  2. For each repo that you want accessible from CVS you need to edit config in the repo and add the following section.

       [gitcvs]
            enabled=1
            # optional for debugging
            logFile=/path/to/logfile

    Note: you need to ensure each user that is going to invoke git-cvsserver has write access to the log file and to the database (see Database Backend. If you want to offer write access over SSH, the users of course also need write access to the Git repository itself.

    You also need to ensure that each repository is "bare" (without a Git index file) for cvs commit to work. See the section called “gitcvs-migration(7)”.

    All configuration variables can also be overridden for a specific method of access. Valid method names are "ext" (for SSH access) and "pserver". The following example configuration would disable pserver access while still allowing access over SSH.

       [gitcvs]
            enabled=0
    
       [gitcvs "ext"]
            enabled=1
  3. If you didn't specify the CVSROOT/CVS_SERVER directly in the checkout command, automatically saving it in your CVS/Root files, then you need to set them explicitly in your environment. CVSROOT should be set as per normal, but the directory should point at the appropriate Git repo. As above, for SSH clients not restricted to git-shell, CVS_SERVER should be set to git-cvsserver.

       export CVSROOT=:ext:user@server:/var/git/project.git
       export CVS_SERVER="git cvsserver"
  4. For SSH clients that will make commits, make sure their server-side .ssh/environment files (or .bashrc, etc., according to their specific shell) export appropriate values for GIT_AUTHOR_NAME, GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME, and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL. For SSH clients whose login shell is bash, .bashrc may be a reasonable alternative.
  5. Clients should now be able to check out the project. Use the CVS module name to indicate what Git head you want to check out. This also sets the name of your newly checked-out directory, unless you tell it otherwise with -d <dir-name>. For example, this checks out master branch to the project-master directory:

       cvs co -d project-master master

DATABASE BACKEND

git-cvsserver uses one database per Git head (i.e. CVS module) to store information about the repository to maintain consistent CVS revision numbers. The database needs to be updated (i.e. written to) after every commit.

If the commit is done directly by using git (as opposed to using git-cvsserver) the update will need to happen on the next repository access by git-cvsserver, independent of access method and requested operation.

That means that even if you offer only read access (e.g. by using the pserver method), git-cvsserver should have write access to the database to work reliably (otherwise you need to make sure that the database is up to date any time git-cvsserver is executed).

By default it uses SQLite databases in the Git directory, named gitcvs.<module-name>.sqlite. Note that the SQLite backend creates temporary files in the same directory as the database file on write so it might not be enough to grant the users using git-cvsserver write access to the database file without granting them write access to the directory, too.

The database cannot be reliably regenerated in a consistent form after the branch it is tracking has changed. Example: For merged branches, git-cvsserver only tracks one branch of development, and after a git merge an incrementally updated database may track a different branch than a database regenerated from scratch, causing inconsistent CVS revision numbers. git-cvsserver has no way of knowing which branch it would have picked if it had been run incrementally pre-merge. So if you have to fully or partially (from old backup) regenerate the database, you should be suspicious of pre-existing CVS sandboxes.

You can configure the database backend with the following configuration variables:

Configuring database backend

git-cvsserver uses the Perl DBI module. Please also read its documentation if changing these variables, especially about DBI->connect().

gitcvs.dbName
Database name. The exact meaning depends on the selected database driver, for SQLite this is a filename. Supports variable substitution (see below). May not contain semicolons (;). Default: %Ggitcvs.%m.sqlite
gitcvs.dbDriver
Used DBI driver. You can specify any available driver for this here, but it might not work. cvsserver is tested with DBD::SQLite, reported to work with DBD::Pg, and reported not to work with DBD::mysql. Please regard this as an experimental feature. May not contain colons (:). Default: SQLite
gitcvs.dbuser
Database user. Only useful if setting dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database users. Supports variable substitution (see below).
gitcvs.dbPass
Database password. Only useful if setting dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database passwords.
gitcvs.dbTableNamePrefix
Database table name prefix. Supports variable substitution (see below). Any non-alphabetic characters will be replaced with underscores.

All variables can also be set per access method, see above.

Variable substitution

In dbDriver and dbUser you can use the following variables:

%G
Git directory name
%g
Git directory name, where all characters except for alphanumeric ones, ., and - are replaced with _ (this should make it easier to use the directory name in a filename if wanted)
%m
CVS module/Git head name
%a
access method (one of "ext" or "pserver")
%u
Name of the user running git-cvsserver. If no name can be determined, the numeric uid is used.

ENVIRONMENT

These variables obviate the need for command-line options in some circumstances, allowing easier restricted usage through git-shell.

GIT_CVSSERVER_BASE_PATH
This variable replaces the argument to --base-path.
GIT_CVSSERVER_ROOT
This variable specifies a single directory, replacing the <directory>... argument list. The repository still requires the gitcvs.enabled config option, unless --export-all is specified.

When these environment variables are set, the corresponding command-line arguments may not be used.

ECLIPSE CVS CLIENT NOTES

To get a checkout with the Eclipse CVS client:

  1. Select "Create a new project → From CVS checkout"
  2. Create a new location. See the notes below for details on how to choose the right protocol.
  3. Browse the modules available. It will give you a list of the heads in the repository. You will not be able to browse the tree from there. Only the heads.
  4. Pick HEAD when it asks what branch/tag to check out. Untick the "launch commit wizard" to avoid committing the .project file.

Protocol notes: If you are using anonymous access via pserver, just select that. Those using SSH access should choose the ext protocol, and configure ext access on the Preferences→Team→CVS→ExtConnection pane. Set CVS_SERVER to "git cvsserver". Note that password support is not good when using ext, you will definitely want to have SSH keys setup.

Alternatively, you can just use the non-standard extssh protocol that Eclipse offer. In that case CVS_SERVER is ignored, and you will have to replace the cvs utility on the server with git-cvsserver or manipulate your .bashrc so that calling cvs effectively calls git-cvsserver.

CLIENTS KNOWN TO WORK

  • CVS 1.12.9 on Debian
  • CVS 1.11.17 on MacOSX (from Fink package)
  • Eclipse 3.0, 3.1.2 on MacOSX (see Eclipse CVS Client Notes)
  • TortoiseCVS

OPERATIONS SUPPORTED

All the operations required for normal use are supported, including checkout, diff, status, update, log, add, remove, commit.

Most CVS command arguments that read CVS tags or revision numbers (typically -r) work, and also support any git refspec (tag, branch, commit ID, etc). However, CVS revision numbers for non-default branches are not well emulated, and cvs log does not show tags or branches at all. (Non-main-branch CVS revision numbers superficially resemble CVS revision numbers, but they actually encode a git commit ID directly, rather than represent the number of revisions since the branch point.)

Note that there are two ways to checkout a particular branch. As described elsewhere on this page, the "module" parameter of cvs checkout is interpreted as a branch name, and it becomes the main branch. It remains the main branch for a given sandbox even if you temporarily make another branch sticky with cvs update -r. Alternatively, the -r argument can indicate some other branch to actually checkout, even though the module is still the "main" branch. Tradeoffs (as currently implemented): Each new "module" creates a new database on disk with a history for the given module, and after the database is created, operations against that main branch are fast. Or alternatively, -r doesn't take any extra disk space, but may be significantly slower for many operations, like cvs update.

If you want to refer to a git refspec that has characters that are not allowed by CVS, you have two options. First, it may just work to supply the git refspec directly to the appropriate CVS -r argument; some CVS clients don't seem to do much sanity checking of the argument. Second, if that fails, you can use a special character escape mechanism that only uses characters that are valid in CVS tags. A sequence of 4 or 5 characters of the form (underscore ("_"), dash ("-"), one or two characters, and dash ("-")) can encode various characters based on the one or two letters: "s" for slash ("/"), "p" for period ("."), "u" for underscore ("_"), or two hexadecimal digits for any byte value at all (typically an ASCII number, or perhaps a part of a UTF-8 encoded character).

Legacy monitoring operations are not supported (edit, watch and related). Exports and tagging (tags and branches) are not supported at this stage.

CRLF Line Ending Conversions

By default the server leaves the -k mode blank for all files, which causes the CVS client to treat them as a text files, subject to end-of-line conversion on some platforms.

You can make the server use the end-of-line conversion attributes to set the -k modes for files by setting the gitcvs.usecrlfattr config variable. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for more information about end-of-line conversion.

Alternatively, if gitcvs.usecrlfattr config is not enabled or the attributes do not allow automatic detection for a filename, then the server uses the gitcvs.allBinary config for the default setting. If gitcvs.allBinary is set, then file not otherwise specified will default to -kb mode. Otherwise the -k mode is left blank. But if gitcvs.allBinary is set to "guess", then the correct -k mode will be guessed based on the contents of the file.

For best consistency with cvs, it is probably best to override the defaults by setting gitcvs.usecrlfattr to true, and gitcvs.allBinary to "guess".

DEPENDENCIES

git-cvsserver depends on DBD::SQLite.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-daemon(1)

NAME

git-daemon - A really simple server for Git repositories

SYNOPSIS

git daemon [--verbose] [--syslog] [--export-all]
           [--timeout=<n>] [--init-timeout=<n>] [--max-connections=<n>]
           [--strict-paths] [--base-path=<path>] [--base-path-relaxed]
           [--user-path | --user-path=<path>]
           [--interpolated-path=<pathtemplate>]
           [--reuseaddr] [--detach] [--pid-file=<file>]
           [--enable=<service>] [--disable=<service>]
           [--allow-override=<service>] [--forbid-override=<service>]
           [--access-hook=<path>] [--[no-]informative-errors]
           [--inetd |
             [--listen=<host-or-ipaddr>] [--port=<n>]
             [--user=<user> [--group=<group>]]]
           [--log-destination=(stderr|syslog|none)]
           [<directory>]

DESCRIPTION

A really simple TCP Git daemon that normally listens on port "DEFAULT_GIT_PORT" aka 9418. It waits for a connection asking for a service, and will serve that service if it is enabled.

It verifies that the directory has the magic file "git-daemon-export-ok", and it will refuse to export any Git directory that hasn't explicitly been marked for export this way (unless the --export-all parameter is specified). If you pass some directory paths as git daemon arguments, the offers are limited to repositories within those directories.

By default, only upload-pack service is enabled, which serves git fetch-pack and git ls-remote clients, which are invoked from git fetch, git pull, and git clone.

This is ideally suited for read-only updates, i.e., pulling from Git repositories.

An upload-archive also exists to serve git archive.

OPTIONS

--strict-paths
Match paths exactly (i.e. don't allow "/foo/repo" when the real path is "/foo/repo.git" or "/foo/repo/.git") and don't do user-relative paths. git daemon will refuse to start when this option is enabled and no directory arguments are provided.
--base-path=<path>
Remap all the path requests as relative to the given path. This is sort of "Git root" - if you run git daemon with --base-path=/srv/git on example.com, then if you later try to pull from git://example.com/hello.git, git daemon will interpret the path as /srv/git/hello.git.
--base-path-relaxed
If --base-path is enabled and repo lookup fails, with this option git daemon will attempt to lookup without prefixing the base path. This is useful for switching to --base-path usage, while still allowing the old paths.
--interpolated-path=<pathtemplate>
To support virtual hosting, an interpolated path template can be used to dynamically construct alternate paths. The template supports %H for the target hostname as supplied by the client but converted to all lowercase, %CH for the canonical hostname, %IP for the server's IP address, %P for the port number, and %D for the absolute path of the named repository. After interpolation, the path is validated against the directory list.
--export-all
Allow pulling from all directories that look like Git repositories (have the objects and refs subdirectories), even if they do not have the git-daemon-export-ok file.
--inetd
Have the server run as an inetd service. Implies --syslog (may be overridden with --log-destination=). Incompatible with --detach, --port, --listen, --user and --group options.
--listen=<host-or-ipaddr>
Listen on a specific IP address or hostname. IP addresses can be either an IPv4 address or an IPv6 address if supported. If IPv6 is not supported, then --listen=<hostname> is also not supported and --listen must be given an IPv4 address. Can be given more than once. Incompatible with --inetd option.
--port=<n>
Listen on an alternative port. Incompatible with --inetd option.
--init-timeout=<n>
Timeout (in seconds) between the moment the connection is established and the client request is received (typically a rather low value, since that should be basically immediate).
--timeout=<n>
Timeout (in seconds) for specific client sub-requests. This includes the time it takes for the server to process the sub-request and the time spent waiting for the next client's request.
--max-connections=<n>
Maximum number of concurrent clients, defaults to 32. Set it to zero for no limit.
--syslog
Short for --log-destination=syslog.
--log-destination=<destination>

Send log messages to the specified destination. Note that this option does not imply --verbose, thus by default only error conditions will be logged. The <destination> must be one of:

stderr
Write to standard error. Note that if --detach is specified, the process disconnects from the real standard error, making this destination effectively equivalent to none.
syslog
Write to syslog, using the git-daemon identifier.
none
Disable all logging.

The default destination is syslog if --inetd or --detach is specified, otherwise stderr.

--user-path , --user-path=<path>
Allow ~user notation to be used in requests. When specified with no parameter, a request to git://host/~alice/foo is taken as a request to access foo repository in the home directory of user alice. If --user-path=<path> is specified, the same request is taken as a request to access <path>/foo repository in the home directory of user alice.
--verbose
Log details about the incoming connections and requested files.
--reuseaddr
Use SO_REUSEADDR when binding the listening socket. This allows the server to restart without waiting for old connections to time out.
--detach
Detach from the shell. Implies --syslog.
--pid-file=<file>
Save the process id in <file>. Ignored when the daemon is run under --inetd.
--user=<user> , --group=<group>

Change daemon's uid and gid before entering the service loop. When only --user is given without --group, the primary group ID for the user is used. The values of the option are given to getpwnam(3) and getgrnam(3) and numeric IDs are not supported.

Giving these options is an error when used with --inetd; use the facility of inet daemon to achieve the same before spawning git daemon if needed.

Like many programs that switch user id, the daemon does not reset environment variables such as HOME when it runs git programs, e.g. upload-pack and receive-pack. When using this option, you may also want to set and export HOME to point at the home directory of <user> before starting the daemon, and make sure any Git configuration files in that directory are readable by <user>.

--enable=<service> , --disable=<service>
Enable/disable the service site-wide per default. Note that a service disabled site-wide can still be enabled per repository if it is marked overridable and the repository enables the service with a configuration item.
--allow-override=<service> , --forbid-override=<service>
Allow/forbid overriding the site-wide default with per repository configuration. By default, all the services may be overridden.
--informative-errors , --no-informative-errors
When informative errors are turned on, git-daemon will report more verbose errors to the client, differentiating conditions like "no such repository" from "repository not exported". This is more convenient for clients, but may leak information about the existence of unexported repositories. When informative errors are not enabled, all errors report "access denied" to the client. The default is --no-informative-errors.
--access-hook=<path>

Every time a client connects, first run an external command specified by the <path> with service name (e.g. "upload-pack"), path to the repository, hostname (%H), canonical hostname (%CH), IP address (%IP), and TCP port (%P) as its command-line arguments. The external command can decide to decline the service by exiting with a non-zero status (or to allow it by exiting with a zero status). It can also look at the $REMOTE_ADDR and $REMOTE_PORT environment variables to learn about the requestor when making this decision.

The external command can optionally write a single line to its standard output to be sent to the requestor as an error message when it declines the service.

<directory>
The remaining arguments provide a list of directories. If any directories are specified, then the git-daemon process will serve a requested directory only if it is contained in one of these directories. If --strict-paths is specified, then the requested directory must match one of these directories exactly.

SERVICES

These services can be globally enabled/disabled using the command-line options of this command. If finer-grained control is desired (e.g. to allow git archive to be run against only in a few selected repositories the daemon serves), the per-repository configuration file can be used to enable or disable them.

upload-pack
This serves git fetch-pack and git ls-remote clients. It is enabled by default, but a repository can disable it by setting daemon.uploadpack configuration item to false.
upload-archive
This serves git archive --remote. It is disabled by default, but a repository can enable it by setting daemon.uploadarch configuration item to true.
receive-pack
This serves git send-pack clients, allowing anonymous push. It is disabled by default, as there is no authentication in the protocol (in other words, anybody can push anything into the repository, including removal of refs). This is solely meant for a closed LAN setting where everybody is friendly. This service can be enabled by setting daemon.receivepack configuration item to true.

EXAMPLES

We assume the following in /etc/services
$ grep 9418 /etc/services
git             9418/tcp                # Git Version Control System
git daemon as inetd server

To set up git daemon as an inetd service that handles any repository within /pub/foo or /pub/bar, place an entry like the following into /etc/inetd all on one line:

        git stream tcp nowait nobody  /usr/bin/git
                git daemon --inetd --verbose --export-all
                /pub/foo /pub/bar
git daemon as inetd server for virtual hosts

To set up git daemon as an inetd service that handles repositories for different virtual hosts, www.example.com and www.example.org, place an entry like the following into /etc/inetd all on one line:

        git stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/bin/git
                git daemon --inetd --verbose --export-all
                --interpolated-path=/pub/%H%D
                /pub/www.example.org/software
                /pub/www.example.com/software
                /software

In this example, the root-level directory /pub will contain a subdirectory for each virtual host name supported. Further, both hosts advertise repositories simply as git://www.example.com/software/repo.git. For pre-1.4.0 clients, a symlink from /software into the appropriate default repository could be made as well.

git daemon as regular daemon for virtual hosts

To set up git daemon as a regular, non-inetd service that handles repositories for multiple virtual hosts based on their IP addresses, start the daemon like this:

        git daemon --verbose --export-all
                --interpolated-path=/pub/%IP/%D
                /pub/192.168.1.200/software
                /pub/10.10.220.23/software

In this example, the root-level directory /pub will contain a subdirectory for each virtual host IP address supported. Repositories can still be accessed by hostname though, assuming they correspond to these IP addresses.

selectively enable/disable services per repository

To enable git archive --remote and disable git fetch against a repository, have the following in the configuration file in the repository (that is the file config next to HEAD, refs and objects).

        [daemon]
                uploadpack = false
                uploadarch = true

ENVIRONMENT

git daemon will set REMOTE_ADDR to the IP address of the client that connected to it, if the IP address is available. REMOTE_ADDR will be available in the environment of hooks called when services are performed.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-describe(1)

NAME

git-describe - Give an object a human readable name based on an available ref

SYNOPSIS

git describe [--all] [--tags] [--contains] [--abbrev=<n>] [<commit-ish>…]
git describe [--all] [--tags] [--contains] [--abbrev=<n>] --dirty[=<mark>]
git describe <blob>

DESCRIPTION

The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit. If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is shown. Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of additional commits on top of the tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the most recent commit. The result is a "human-readable" object name which can also be used to identify the commit to other git commands.

By default (without --all or --tags) git describe only shows annotated tags. For more information about creating annotated tags see the -a and -s options to the section called “git-tag(1)”.

If the given object refers to a blob, it will be described as <commit-ish>:<path>, such that the blob can be found at <path> in the <commit-ish>, which itself describes the first commit in which this blob occurs in a reverse revision walk from HEAD.

OPTIONS

<commit-ish>…
Commit-ish object names to describe. Defaults to HEAD if omitted.
--dirty[=<mark>] , --broken[=<mark>]
Describe the state of the working tree. When the working tree matches HEAD, the output is the same as "git describe HEAD". If the working tree has local modification "-dirty" is appended to it. If a repository is corrupt and Git cannot determine if there is local modification, Git will error out, unless --broken is given, which appends the suffix "-broken" instead.
--all
Instead of using only the annotated tags, use any ref found in refs/ namespace. This option enables matching any known branch, remote-tracking branch, or lightweight tag.
--tags
Instead of using only the annotated tags, use any tag found in refs/tags namespace. This option enables matching a lightweight (non-annotated) tag.
--contains
Instead of finding the tag that predates the commit, find the tag that comes after the commit, and thus contains it. Automatically implies --tags.
--abbrev=<n>
Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary according to the number of objects in the repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object name, use <n> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a unique object name. An <n> of 0 will suppress long format, only showing the closest tag.
--candidates=<n>
Instead of considering only the 10 most recent tags as candidates to describe the input commit-ish consider up to <n> candidates. Increasing <n> above 10 will take slightly longer but may produce a more accurate result. An <n> of 0 will cause only exact matches to be output.
--exact-match
Only output exact matches (a tag directly references the supplied commit). This is a synonym for --candidates=0.
--debug
Verbosely display information about the searching strategy being employed to standard error. The tag name will still be printed to standard out.
--long
Always output the long format (the tag, the number of commits and the abbreviated commit name) even when it matches a tag. This is useful when you want to see parts of the commit object name in "describe" output, even when the commit in question happens to be a tagged version. Instead of just emitting the tag name, it will describe such a commit as v1.2-0-gdeadbee (0th commit since tag v1.2 that points at object deadbee….).
--match <pattern>
Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix. If used with --all, it also considers local branches and remote-tracking references matching the pattern, excluding respectively "refs/heads/" and "refs/remotes/" prefix; references of other types are never considered. If given multiple times, a list of patterns will be accumulated, and tags matching any of the patterns will be considered. Use --no-match to clear and reset the list of patterns.
--exclude <pattern>
Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix. If used with --all, it also does not consider local branches and remote-tracking references matching the pattern, excluding respectively "refs/heads/" and "refs/remotes/" prefix; references of other types are never considered. If given multiple times, a list of patterns will be accumulated and tags matching any of the patterns will be excluded. When combined with --match a tag will be considered when it matches at least one --match pattern and does not match any of the --exclude patterns. Use --no-exclude to clear and reset the list of patterns.
--always
Show uniquely abbreviated commit object as fallback.
--first-parent
Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This is useful when you wish to not match tags on branches merged in the history of the target commit.

EXAMPLES

With something like git.git current tree, I get:

[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe parent
v1.0.4-14-g2414721

i.e. the current head of my "parent" branch is based on v1.0.4, but since it has a few commits on top of that, describe has added the number of additional commits ("14") and an abbreviated object name for the commit itself ("2414721") at the end.

The number of additional commits is the number of commits which would be displayed by "git log v1.0.4..parent". The hash suffix is "-g" + an unambiguous abbreviation for the tip commit of parent (which was 2414721b194453f058079d897d13c4e377f92dc6). The length of the abbreviation scales as the repository grows, using the approximate number of objects in the repository and a bit of math around the birthday paradox, and defaults to a minimum of 7. The "g" prefix stands for "git" and is used to allow describing the version of a software depending on the SCM the software is managed with. This is useful in an environment where people may use different SCMs.

Doing a git describe on a tag-name will just show the tag name:

[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe v1.0.4
v1.0.4

With --all, the command can use branch heads as references, so the output shows the reference path as well:

[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --all --abbrev=4 v1.0.5^2
tags/v1.0.0-21-g975b
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --all --abbrev=4 HEAD^
heads/lt/describe-7-g975b

With --abbrev set to 0, the command can be used to find the closest tagname without any suffix:

[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --abbrev=0 v1.0.5^2
tags/v1.0.0

Note that the suffix you get if you type these commands today may be longer than what Linus saw above when he ran these commands, as your Git repository may have new commits whose object names begin with 975b that did not exist back then, and "-g975b" suffix alone may not be sufficient to disambiguate these commits.

SEARCH STRATEGY

For each commit-ish supplied, git describe will first look for a tag which tags exactly that commit. Annotated tags will always be preferred over lightweight tags, and tags with newer dates will always be preferred over tags with older dates. If an exact match is found, its name will be output and searching will stop.

If an exact match was not found, git describe will walk back through the commit history to locate an ancestor commit which has been tagged. The ancestor's tag will be output along with an abbreviation of the input commit-ish's SHA-1. If --first-parent was specified then the walk will only consider the first parent of each commit.

If multiple tags were found during the walk then the tag which has the fewest commits different from the input commit-ish will be selected and output. Here fewest commits different is defined as the number of commits which would be shown by git log tag..input will be the smallest number of commits possible.

BUGS

Tree objects as well as tag objects not pointing at commits, cannot be described. When describing blobs, the lightweight tags pointing at blobs are ignored, but the blob is still described as <commit-ish>:<path> despite the lightweight tag being favorable.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diagnose(1)

NAME

git-diagnose - Generate a zip archive of diagnostic information

SYNOPSIS

git diagnose [(-o | --output-directory) <path>] [(-s | --suffix) <format>]
               [--mode=<mode>]

DESCRIPTION

Collects detailed information about the user's machine, Git client, and repository state and packages that information into a zip archive. The generated archive can then, for example, be shared with the Git mailing list to help debug an issue or serve as a reference for independent debugging.

By default, the following information is captured in the archive:

  • git version --build-options
  • The path to the repository root
  • The available disk space on the filesystem
  • The name and size of each packfile, including those in alternate object stores
  • The total count of loose objects, as well as counts broken down by .git/objects subdirectory

Additional information can be collected by selecting a different diagnostic mode using the --mode option.

This tool differs from the section called “git-bugreport(1)” in that it collects much more detailed information with a greater focus on reporting the size and data shape of repository contents.

OPTIONS

-o <path> , --output-directory <path>
Place the resulting diagnostics archive in <path> instead of the current directory.
-s <format> , --suffix <format>
Specify an alternate suffix for the diagnostics archive name, to create a file named git-diagnostics-<formatted-suffix>. This should take the form of a strftime(3) format string; the current local time will be used.
--mode=(stats|all)

Specify the type of diagnostics that should be collected. The default behavior of git diagnose is equivalent to --mode=stats.

The --mode=all option collects everything included in --mode=stats, as well as copies of .git, .git/hooks, .git/info, .git/logs, and .git/objects/info directories. This additional information may be sensitive, as it can be used to reconstruct the full contents of the diagnosed repository. Users should exercise caution when sharing an archive generated with --mode=all.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diff-files(1)

NAME

git-diff-files - Compares files in the working tree and the index

SYNOPSIS

git diff-files [-q] [-0 | -1 | -2 | -3 | -c | --cc] [<common-diff-options>] [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Compares the files in the working tree and the index. When paths are specified, compares only those named paths. Otherwise all entries in the index are compared. The output format is the same as for git diff-index and git diff-tree.

OPTIONS

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
Generate the diff in raw format. This is the default.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

When --raw, --numstat, --name-only or --name-status has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--exit-code
Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.
--quiet
Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code. Disables execution of external diff helpers whose exit code is not trusted, i.e. their respective configuration option diff.trustExitCode or diff.<driver>.trustExitCode or environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE is false.
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

-1 --base , -2 --ours , -3 --theirs , -0

Diff against the "base" version, "our branch", or "their branch" respectively. With these options, diffs for merged entries are not shown.

The default is to diff against our branch (-2) and the cleanly resolved paths. The option -0 can be given to omit diff output for unmerged entries and just show "Unmerged".

-c , --cc
This compares stage 2 (our branch), stage 3 (their branch), and the working tree file and outputs a combined diff, similar to the way diff-tree shows a merge commit with these flags.
-q
Remain silent even for nonexistent files

Raw output format

The raw output format from git-diff-index, git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git diff --raw are very similar.

These commands all compare two sets of things; what is compared differs:

git-diff-index <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the files on the filesystem.
git-diff-index --cached <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the index.
git-diff-tree [-r] <tree-ish-1> <tree-ish-2> [<pattern>...]
compares the trees named by the two arguments.
git-diff-files [<pattern>...]
compares the index and the files on the filesystem.

The git-diff-tree command begins its output by printing the hash of what is being compared. After that, all the commands print one output line per changed file.

An output line is formatted this way:

in-place edit  :100644 100644 bcd1234 0123456 M file0
copy-edit      :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 C68 file1 file2
rename-edit    :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 R86 file1 file3
create         :000000 100644 0000000 1234567 A file4
delete         :100644 000000 1234567 0000000 D file5
unmerged       :000000 000000 0000000 0000000 U file6

That is, from the left to the right:

  1. a colon.
  2. mode for "src"; 000000 if creation or unmerged.
  3. a space.
  4. mode for "dst"; 000000 if deletion or unmerged.
  5. a space.
  6. sha1 for "src"; 0{40} if creation or unmerged.
  7. a space.
  8. sha1 for "dst"; 0{40} if deletion, unmerged or "work tree out of sync with the index".
  9. a space.
  10. status, followed by optional "score" number.
  11. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used.
  12. path for "src"
  13. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used; only exists for C or R.
  14. path for "dst"; only exists for C or R.
  15. an LF or a NUL when -z option is used, to terminate the record.

Possible status letters are:

  • A: addition of a file
  • C: copy of a file into a new one
  • D: deletion of a file
  • M: modification of the contents or mode of a file
  • R: renaming of a file
  • T: change in the type of the file (regular file, symbolic link or submodule)
  • U: file is unmerged (you must complete the merge before it can be committed)
  • X: "unknown" change type (most probably a bug, please report it)

Status letters C and R are always followed by a score (denoting the percentage of similarity between the source and target of the move or copy). Status letter M may be followed by a score (denoting the percentage of dissimilarity) for file rewrites.

The sha1 for "dst" is shown as all 0's if a file on the filesystem is out of sync with the index.

Example:

:100644 100644 5be4a4a 0000000 M file.c

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

diff format for merges

git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git-diff --raw can take -c or --cc option to generate diff output also for merge commits. The output differs from the format described above in the following way:

  1. there is a colon for each parent
  2. there are more "src" modes and "src" sha1
  3. status is concatenated status characters for each parent
  4. no optional "score" number
  5. tab-separated pathname(s) of the file

For -c and --cc, only the destination or final path is shown even if the file was renamed on any side of history. With --combined-all-paths, the name of the path in each parent is shown followed by the name of the path in the merge commit.

Examples for -c and --cc without --combined-all-paths:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       phooey.c

Examples when --combined-all-paths added to either -c or --cc:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c  desc.c  desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       foo.sh  bar.sh  bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       fooey.c fuey.c  phooey.c

Note that combined diff lists only files which were modified from all parents.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

other diff formats

The --summary option describes newly added, deleted, renamed and copied files. The --stat option adds diffstat(1) graph to the output. These options can be combined with other options, such as -p, and are meant for human consumption.

When showing a change that involves a rename or a copy, --stat output formats the pathnames compactly by combining common prefix and suffix of the pathnames. For example, a change that moves arch/i386/Makefile to arch/x86/Makefile while modifying 4 lines will be shown like this:

arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile    |   4 +--

The --numstat option gives the diffstat(1) information but is designed for easier machine consumption. An entry in --numstat output looks like this:

1       2       README
3       1       arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile

That is, from left to right:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. pathname (possibly with rename/copy information);
  6. a newline.

When -z output option is in effect, the output is formatted this way:

1       2       README NUL
3       1       NUL arch/i386/Makefile NUL arch/x86/Makefile NUL

That is:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  6. pathname in preimage;
  7. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  8. pathname in postimage (only exists if renamed/copied);
  9. a NUL.

The extra NUL before the preimage path in renamed case is to allow scripts that read the output to tell if the current record being read is a single-path record or a rename/copy record without reading ahead. After reading added and deleted lines, reading up to NUL would yield the pathname, but if that is NUL, the record will show two paths.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diff-index(1)

NAME

git-diff-index - Compare a tree to the working tree or index

SYNOPSIS

git diff-index [-m] [--cached] [--merge-base] [<common-diff-options>] <tree-ish> [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Compare the content and mode of the blobs found in a tree object with the corresponding tracked files in the working tree, or with the corresponding paths in the index. When <path> arguments are present, compare only paths matching those patterns. Otherwise all tracked files are compared.

OPTIONS

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
Generate the diff in raw format. This is the default.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

When --raw, --numstat, --name-only or --name-status has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--exit-code
Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.
--quiet
Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code. Disables execution of external diff helpers whose exit code is not trusted, i.e. their respective configuration option diff.trustExitCode or diff.<driver>.trustExitCode or environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE is false.
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

<tree-ish>
The id of a tree object to diff against.
--cached
Do not consider the on-disk file at all.
--merge-base
Instead of comparing <tree-ish> directly, use the merge base between <tree-ish> and HEAD instead. <tree-ish> must be a commit.
-m
By default, files recorded in the index but not checked out are reported as deleted. This flag makes git diff-index say that all non-checked-out files are up to date.

Raw output format

The raw output format from git-diff-index, git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git diff --raw are very similar.

These commands all compare two sets of things; what is compared differs:

git-diff-index <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the files on the filesystem.
git-diff-index --cached <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the index.
git-diff-tree [-r] <tree-ish-1> <tree-ish-2> [<pattern>...]
compares the trees named by the two arguments.
git-diff-files [<pattern>...]
compares the index and the files on the filesystem.

The git-diff-tree command begins its output by printing the hash of what is being compared. After that, all the commands print one output line per changed file.

An output line is formatted this way:

in-place edit  :100644 100644 bcd1234 0123456 M file0
copy-edit      :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 C68 file1 file2
rename-edit    :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 R86 file1 file3
create         :000000 100644 0000000 1234567 A file4
delete         :100644 000000 1234567 0000000 D file5
unmerged       :000000 000000 0000000 0000000 U file6

That is, from the left to the right:

  1. a colon.
  2. mode for "src"; 000000 if creation or unmerged.
  3. a space.
  4. mode for "dst"; 000000 if deletion or unmerged.
  5. a space.
  6. sha1 for "src"; 0{40} if creation or unmerged.
  7. a space.
  8. sha1 for "dst"; 0{40} if deletion, unmerged or "work tree out of sync with the index".
  9. a space.
  10. status, followed by optional "score" number.
  11. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used.
  12. path for "src"
  13. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used; only exists for C or R.
  14. path for "dst"; only exists for C or R.
  15. an LF or a NUL when -z option is used, to terminate the record.

Possible status letters are:

  • A: addition of a file
  • C: copy of a file into a new one
  • D: deletion of a file
  • M: modification of the contents or mode of a file
  • R: renaming of a file
  • T: change in the type of the file (regular file, symbolic link or submodule)
  • U: file is unmerged (you must complete the merge before it can be committed)
  • X: "unknown" change type (most probably a bug, please report it)

Status letters C and R are always followed by a score (denoting the percentage of similarity between the source and target of the move or copy). Status letter M may be followed by a score (denoting the percentage of dissimilarity) for file rewrites.

The sha1 for "dst" is shown as all 0's if a file on the filesystem is out of sync with the index.

Example:

:100644 100644 5be4a4a 0000000 M file.c

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

diff format for merges

git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git-diff --raw can take -c or --cc option to generate diff output also for merge commits. The output differs from the format described above in the following way:

  1. there is a colon for each parent
  2. there are more "src" modes and "src" sha1
  3. status is concatenated status characters for each parent
  4. no optional "score" number
  5. tab-separated pathname(s) of the file

For -c and --cc, only the destination or final path is shown even if the file was renamed on any side of history. With --combined-all-paths, the name of the path in each parent is shown followed by the name of the path in the merge commit.

Examples for -c and --cc without --combined-all-paths:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       phooey.c

Examples when --combined-all-paths added to either -c or --cc:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c  desc.c  desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       foo.sh  bar.sh  bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       fooey.c fuey.c  phooey.c

Note that combined diff lists only files which were modified from all parents.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

other diff formats

The --summary option describes newly added, deleted, renamed and copied files. The --stat option adds diffstat(1) graph to the output. These options can be combined with other options, such as -p, and are meant for human consumption.

When showing a change that involves a rename or a copy, --stat output formats the pathnames compactly by combining common prefix and suffix of the pathnames. For example, a change that moves arch/i386/Makefile to arch/x86/Makefile while modifying 4 lines will be shown like this:

arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile    |   4 +--

The --numstat option gives the diffstat(1) information but is designed for easier machine consumption. An entry in --numstat output looks like this:

1       2       README
3       1       arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile

That is, from left to right:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. pathname (possibly with rename/copy information);
  6. a newline.

When -z output option is in effect, the output is formatted this way:

1       2       README NUL
3       1       NUL arch/i386/Makefile NUL arch/x86/Makefile NUL

That is:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  6. pathname in preimage;
  7. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  8. pathname in postimage (only exists if renamed/copied);
  9. a NUL.

The extra NUL before the preimage path in renamed case is to allow scripts that read the output to tell if the current record being read is a single-path record or a rename/copy record without reading ahead. After reading added and deleted lines, reading up to NUL would yield the pathname, but if that is NUL, the record will show two paths.

OPERATING MODES

You can choose whether you want to trust the index file entirely (using the --cached flag) or ask the diff logic to show any files that don't match the stat state as being "tentatively changed". Both of these operations are very useful indeed.

CACHED MODE

If --cached is specified, it allows you to ask:

show me the differences between HEAD and the current index
contents (the ones I'd write using 'git write-tree')

For example, let's say that you have worked on your working directory, updated some files in the index and are ready to commit. You want to see exactly what you are going to commit, without having to write a new tree object and compare it that way, and to do that, you just do

git diff-index --cached HEAD

Example: let's say I had renamed commit.c to git-commit.c, and I had done an update-index to make that effective in the index file. git diff-files wouldn't show anything at all, since the index file matches my working directory. But doing a git diff-index does:

torvalds@ppc970:~/git> git diff-index --cached HEAD
:100644 000000 4161aecc6700a2eb579e842af0b7f22b98443f74 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 D    commit.c
:000000 100644 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 4161aecc6700a2eb579e842af0b7f22b98443f74 A    git-commit.c

You can see easily that the above is a rename.

In fact, git diff-index --cached should always be entirely equivalent to actually doing a git write-tree and comparing that. Except this one is much nicer for the case where you just want to check where you are.

So doing a git diff-index --cached is basically very useful when you are asking yourself "what have I already marked for being committed, and what's the difference to a previous tree".

NON-CACHED MODE

The "non-cached" mode takes a different approach, and is potentially the more useful of the two in that what it does can't be emulated with a git write-tree + git diff-tree. Thus that's the default mode. The non-cached version asks the question:

show me the differences between HEAD and the currently checked out
tree - index contents _and_ files that aren't up to date

which is obviously a very useful question too, since that tells you what you could commit. Again, the output matches the git diff-tree -r output to a tee, but with a twist.

The twist is that if some file doesn't match the index, we don't have a backing store thing for it, and we use the magic "all-zero" sha1 to show that. So let's say that you have edited kernel/sched.c, but have not actually done a git update-index on it yet - there is no "object" associated with the new state, and you get:

torvalds@ppc970:~/v2.6/linux> git diff-index --abbrev HEAD
:100644 100644 7476bb5ba 000000000 M  kernel/sched.c

i.e., it shows that the tree has changed, and that kernel/sched.c is not up to date and may contain new stuff. The all-zero sha1 means that to get the real diff, you need to look at the object in the working directory directly rather than do an object-to-object diff.

Note

As with other commands of this type, git diff-index does not actually look at the contents of the file at all. So maybe kernel/sched.c hasn't actually changed, and it's just that you touched it. In either case, it's a note that you need to git update-index it to make the index be in sync.

Note

You can have a mixture of files show up as "has been updated" and "is still dirty in the working directory" together. You can always tell which file is in which state, since the "has been updated" ones show a valid sha1, and the "not in sync with the index" ones will always have the special all-zero sha1.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diff-pairs(1)

NAME

git-diff-pairs - Compare the content and mode of provided blob pairs

SYNOPSIS

git diff-pairs -z [<diff-options>]

DESCRIPTION

Show changes for file pairs provided on stdin. Input for this command must be in the NUL-terminated raw output format as generated by commands such as git diff-tree -z -r --raw. By default, the outputted diffs are computed and shown in the patch format when stdin closes.

A single NUL byte may be written to stdin between raw input lines to compute file pair diffs up to that point instead of waiting for stdin to close. A NUL byte is also written to the output to delimit between these batches of diffs.

Usage of this command enables the traditional diff pipeline to be broken up into separate stages where diff-pairs acts as the output phase. Other commands, such as diff-tree, may serve as a frontend to compute the raw diff format used as input.

Instead of computing diffs via git diff-tree -p -M in one step, diff-tree can compute the file pairs and rename information without the blob diffs. This output can be fed to diff-pairs to generate the underlying blob diffs as done in the following example:

git diff-tree -z -r -M $a $b |
git diff-pairs -z

Computing the tree diff upfront with rename information allows patch output from diff-pairs to be progressively computed over the course of potentially multiple invocations.

Pathspecs are not currently supported by diff-pairs. Pathspec limiting should be performed by the upstream command generating the raw diffs used as input.

Tree objects are not currently supported as input and are rejected.

Abbreviated object IDs in the diff-pairs input are not supported. Outputted object IDs can be abbreviated using the --abbrev option.

OPTIONS

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
Generate the diff in raw format. This is the default.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

When --raw, --numstat, --name-only or --name-status has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--exit-code
Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.
--quiet
Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code. Disables execution of external diff helpers whose exit code is not trusted, i.e. their respective configuration option diff.trustExitCode or diff.<driver>.trustExitCode or environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE is false.
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diff-tree(1)

NAME

git-diff-tree - Compares the content and mode of blobs found via two tree objects

SYNOPSIS

git diff-tree [--stdin] [-m] [-s] [-v] [--no-commit-id] [--pretty]
              [-t] [-r] [-c | --cc] [--combined-all-paths] [--root] [--merge-base]
              [<common-diff-options>] <tree-ish> [<tree-ish>] [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Compare the content and mode of blobs found via two tree objects.

If there is only one <tree-ish> given, the commit is compared with its parents (see --stdin below).

Note that git diff-tree can use the tree encapsulated in a commit object.

OPTIONS

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
Generate the diff in raw format. This is the default.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

When --raw, --numstat, --name-only or --name-status has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--exit-code
Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.
--quiet
Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code. Disables execution of external diff helpers whose exit code is not trusted, i.e. their respective configuration option diff.trustExitCode or diff.<driver>.trustExitCode or environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE is false.
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

<tree-ish>
The id of a tree object.
<path>…
If provided, the results are limited to a subset of files matching one of the provided pathspecs.
-r
Recurse into sub-trees.
-t
Show tree entry itself as well as subtrees. Implies -r.
--root
When --root is specified the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is equivalent to a diff against the NULL tree.
--merge-base
Instead of comparing the <tree-ish>s directly, use the merge base between the two <tree-ish>s as the "before" side. There must be two <tree-ish>s given and they must both be commits.
--stdin

When --stdin is specified, the command does not take <tree-ish> arguments from the command line. Instead, it reads lines containing either two <tree>, one <commit>, or a list of <commit> from its standard input. (Use a single space as separator.)

When two trees are given, it compares the first tree with the second. When a single commit is given, it compares the commit with its parents. The remaining commits, when given, are used as if they are parents of the first commit.

When comparing two trees, the ID of both trees (separated by a space and terminated by a newline) is printed before the difference. When comparing commits, the ID of the first (or only) commit, followed by a newline, is printed.

The following flags further affect the behavior when comparing commits (but not trees).

-m
By default, git diff-tree --stdin does not show differences for merge commits. With this flag, it shows differences to that commit from all of its parents. See also -c.
-s
By default, git diff-tree --stdin shows differences, either in machine-readable form (without -p) or in patch form (with -p). This output can be suppressed. It is only useful with the -v flag.
-v
This flag causes git diff-tree --stdin to also show the commit message before the differences.
--pretty[=<format>] , --format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format> were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

--no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit, either explicit or implied by other options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.
--oneline
This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.
--encoding=<encoding>
Commit objects record the character encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output the original object verbatim.
--expand-tabs=<n> , --expand-tabs , --no-expand-tabs

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>) in the log message before showing it in the output. --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format, or --oneline option given on the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

With an optional <ref> argument, use the ref to find the notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name of the ref.

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "--notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "--notes=foo --notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

--no-notes
Do not show notes. This negates the above --notes option, by resetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown. Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g. "--notes --notes=foo --no-notes --notes=bar" will only show notes from "refs/notes/bar".
--show-notes-by-default
Show the default notes unless options for displaying specific notes are given.
--show-notes[=<ref>] , --[no-]standard-notes
These options are deprecated. Use the above --notes/--no-notes options instead.
--show-signature
Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signature to gpg --verify and show the output.
--no-commit-id
git diff-tree outputs a line with the commit ID when applicable. This flag suppresses the commit ID output.
-c
This flag changes the way a merge commit is displayed (which means it is useful only when the command is given one <tree-ish>, or --stdin). It shows the differences from each of the parents to the merge result simultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff between a parent and the result one at a time (which is what the -m option does). Furthermore, it lists only files which were modified from all parents.
--cc
This flag changes the way a merge commit patch is displayed, in a similar way to the -c option. It implies the -c and -p options and further compresses the patch output by omitting uninteresting hunks whose contents in the parents have only two variants and the merge result picks one of them without modification. When all hunks are uninteresting, the commit itself and the commit log message are not shown, just like in any other "empty diff" case.
--combined-all-paths
This flag causes combined diffs (used for merge commits) to list the name of the file from all parents. It thus only has effect when -c or --cc are specified, and is likely only useful if filename changes are detected (i.e. when either rename or copy detection have been requested).
--always
Show the commit itself and the commit log message even if the diff itself is empty.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the hashes of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

  • oneline

    <hash> <title-line>

    This is designed to be as compact as possible.

  • short

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    <title-line>
  • medium

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Date:   <author-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • full

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Commit: <committer>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • fuller

    commit <hash>
    Author:     <author>
    AuthorDate: <author-date>
    Commit:     <committer>
    CommitDate: <committer-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • reference

    <abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

    This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s, %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with any format: with format placeholders, its output is not affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

  • email

    From <hash> <date>
    From: <author>
    Date: <author-date>
    Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • mboxrd

    Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so they aren't confused as starting a new commit.

  • raw

    The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

  • format:<format-string>

    The format:<format-string> format allows you to specify which information you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format, with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n instead of \n.

    E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:

    The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
    The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

    The placeholders are:

    • Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

      %n
      newline
      %%
      a raw %
      %x00
      %x followed by two hexadecimal digits is replaced with a byte with the hexadecimal digits' value (we will call this "literal formatting code" in the rest of this document).
    • Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders:

      %Cred
      switch color to red
      %Cgreen
      switch color to green
      %Cblue
      switch color to blue
      %Creset
      reset color
      %C(…)
      color specification, as described under Values in the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-config(1)”. By default, colors are shown only when enabled for log output (by color.diff, color.ui, or --color, and respecting the auto settings of the former if we are going to a terminal). %C(auto,...) is accepted as a historical synonym for the default (e.g., %C(auto,red)). Specifying %C(always,...) will show the colors even when color is not otherwise enabled (though consider just using --color=always to enable color for the whole output, including this format and anything else git might color). auto alone (i.e. %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloring on the next placeholders until the color is switched again.
      %m
      left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark
      %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])
      switch line wrapping, like the -w option of the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
      %<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
      make the next placeholder take at least N column widths, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Optionally truncate (with ellipsis ..) at the left (ltrunc) ..ft, the middle (mtrunc) mi..le, or the end (trunc) rig.., if the output is longer than N columns. Note 1: that truncating only works correctly with N >= 2. Note 2: spaces around the N and M (see below) values are optional. Note 3: Emojis and other wide characters will take two display columns, which may over-run column boundaries. Note 4: decomposed character combining marks may be misplaced at padding boundaries.
      %<|( <M> )
      make the next placeholder take at least until Mth display column, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Use negative M values for column positions measured from the right hand edge of the terminal window.
      %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding spaces on the left
      %>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )
      similar to %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> ) respectively, except that if the next placeholder takes more spaces than given and there are spaces on its left, use those spaces
      %><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding both sides (i.e. the text is centered)
    • Placeholders that expand to information extracted from the commit:

      %H
      commit hash
      %h
      abbreviated commit hash
      %T
      tree hash
      %t
      abbreviated tree hash
      %P
      parent hashes
      %p
      abbreviated parent hashes
      %an
      author name
      %aN
      author name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ae
      author email
      %aE
      author email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %al
      author email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %aL
      author local-part (see %al) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ad
      author date (format respects --date= option)
      %aD
      author date, RFC2822 style
      %ar
      author date, relative
      %at
      author date, UNIX timestamp
      %ai
      author date, ISO 8601-like format
      %aI
      author date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %as
      author date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ah
      author date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %cn
      committer name
      %cN
      committer name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ce
      committer email
      %cE
      committer email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cl
      committer email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %cL
      committer local-part (see %cl) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cd
      committer date (format respects --date= option)
      %cD
      committer date, RFC2822 style
      %cr
      committer date, relative
      %ct
      committer date, UNIX timestamp
      %ci
      committer date, ISO 8601-like format
      %cI
      committer date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %cs
      committer date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ch
      committer date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %d
      ref names, like the --decorate option of the section called “git-log(1)”
      %D
      ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.
      %(decorate[:<options>])

      ref names with custom decorations. The decorate string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Option values may contain literal formatting codes. These must be used for commas (%x2C) and closing parentheses (%x29), due to their role in the option syntax.

      • prefix=<value>: Shown before the list of ref names. Defaults to " (".
      • suffix=<value>: Shown after the list of ref names. Defaults to ")".
      • separator=<value>: Shown between ref names. Defaults to ", ".
      • pointer=<value>: Shown between HEAD and the branch it points to, if any. Defaults to " -> ".
      • tag=<value>: Shown before tag names. Defaults to "tag: ".

      For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

      %(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

      %(describe[:<options>])

      human-readable name, like the section called “git-describe(1)”; empty string for undescribable commits. The describe string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Descriptions can be inconsistent when tags are added or removed at the same time.

      • tags[=<bool-value>]: Instead of only considering annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as well.
      • abbrev=<number>: Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary according to the number of objects in the repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object name, use <number> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a unique object name.
      • match=<pattern>: Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      • exclude=<pattern>: Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      %S
      ref name given on the command line by which the commit was reached (like git log --source), only works with git log
      %e
      encoding
      %s
      subject
      %f
      sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
      %b
      body
      %B
      raw body (unwrapped subject and body)
      %N
      commit notes
      %GG
      raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit
      %G?
      show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired, "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R" for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key) and "N" for no signature
      %GS
      show the name of the signer for a signed commit
      %GK
      show the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GF
      show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GP
      show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey was used to sign a signed commit
      %GT
      show the trust level for the key used to sign a signed commit
      %gD
      reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or refs/stash@{2 minutes ago}; the format follows the rules described for the -g option. The portion before the @ is the refname as given on the command line (so git log -g refs/heads/master would yield refs/heads/master@{0}).
      %gd
      shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the refname portion is shortened for human readability (so refs/heads/master becomes just master).
      %gn
      reflog identity name
      %gN
      reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ge
      reflog identity email
      %gE
      reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %gs
      reflog subject
      %(trailers[:<options>])

      display the trailers of the body as interpreted by the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”. The trailers string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. If any option is provided multiple times, the last occurrence wins.

      • key=<key>: only show trailers with specified <key>. Matching is done case-insensitively and trailing colon is optional. If option is given multiple times trailer lines matching any of the keys are shown. This option automatically enables the only option so that non-trailer lines in the trailer block are hidden. If that is not desired it can be disabled with only=false. E.g., %(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines with key Reviewed-by.
      • only[=<bool>]: select whether non-trailer lines from the trailer block should be included.
      • separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between trailer lines. Defaults to a line feed character. The string <sep> may contain the literal formatting codes described above. To use comma as separator one must use %x2C as it would otherwise be parsed as next option. E.g., %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C ) shows all trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by a comma and a space.
      • unfold[=<bool>]: make it behave as if interpret-trailer's --unfold option was given. E.g., %(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and shows all trailer lines.
      • keyonly[=<bool>]: only show the key part of the trailer.
      • valueonly[=<bool>]: only show the value part of the trailer.
      • key_value_separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between the key and value of each trailer. Defaults to ": ". Otherwise it shares the same semantics as separator=<sep> above.

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The values taken by --type=bool git-config[1], like yes and off, are all accepted. Giving a boolean option without =<value> is equivalent to giving it with =true.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

  • tformat:

    The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries. This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does. For example:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
    
    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973

    In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two are equivalent:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
    $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

Raw output format

The raw output format from git-diff-index, git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git diff --raw are very similar.

These commands all compare two sets of things; what is compared differs:

git-diff-index <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the files on the filesystem.
git-diff-index --cached <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the index.
git-diff-tree [-r] <tree-ish-1> <tree-ish-2> [<pattern>...]
compares the trees named by the two arguments.
git-diff-files [<pattern>...]
compares the index and the files on the filesystem.

The git-diff-tree command begins its output by printing the hash of what is being compared. After that, all the commands print one output line per changed file.

An output line is formatted this way:

in-place edit  :100644 100644 bcd1234 0123456 M file0
copy-edit      :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 C68 file1 file2
rename-edit    :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 R86 file1 file3
create         :000000 100644 0000000 1234567 A file4
delete         :100644 000000 1234567 0000000 D file5
unmerged       :000000 000000 0000000 0000000 U file6

That is, from the left to the right:

  1. a colon.
  2. mode for "src"; 000000 if creation or unmerged.
  3. a space.
  4. mode for "dst"; 000000 if deletion or unmerged.
  5. a space.
  6. sha1 for "src"; 0{40} if creation or unmerged.
  7. a space.
  8. sha1 for "dst"; 0{40} if deletion, unmerged or "work tree out of sync with the index".
  9. a space.
  10. status, followed by optional "score" number.
  11. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used.
  12. path for "src"
  13. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used; only exists for C or R.
  14. path for "dst"; only exists for C or R.
  15. an LF or a NUL when -z option is used, to terminate the record.

Possible status letters are:

  • A: addition of a file
  • C: copy of a file into a new one
  • D: deletion of a file
  • M: modification of the contents or mode of a file
  • R: renaming of a file
  • T: change in the type of the file (regular file, symbolic link or submodule)
  • U: file is unmerged (you must complete the merge before it can be committed)
  • X: "unknown" change type (most probably a bug, please report it)

Status letters C and R are always followed by a score (denoting the percentage of similarity between the source and target of the move or copy). Status letter M may be followed by a score (denoting the percentage of dissimilarity) for file rewrites.

The sha1 for "dst" is shown as all 0's if a file on the filesystem is out of sync with the index.

Example:

:100644 100644 5be4a4a 0000000 M file.c

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

diff format for merges

git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git-diff --raw can take -c or --cc option to generate diff output also for merge commits. The output differs from the format described above in the following way:

  1. there is a colon for each parent
  2. there are more "src" modes and "src" sha1
  3. status is concatenated status characters for each parent
  4. no optional "score" number
  5. tab-separated pathname(s) of the file

For -c and --cc, only the destination or final path is shown even if the file was renamed on any side of history. With --combined-all-paths, the name of the path in each parent is shown followed by the name of the path in the merge commit.

Examples for -c and --cc without --combined-all-paths:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       phooey.c

Examples when --combined-all-paths added to either -c or --cc:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c  desc.c  desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       foo.sh  bar.sh  bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       fooey.c fuey.c  phooey.c

Note that combined diff lists only files which were modified from all parents.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

other diff formats

The --summary option describes newly added, deleted, renamed and copied files. The --stat option adds diffstat(1) graph to the output. These options can be combined with other options, such as -p, and are meant for human consumption.

When showing a change that involves a rename or a copy, --stat output formats the pathnames compactly by combining common prefix and suffix of the pathnames. For example, a change that moves arch/i386/Makefile to arch/x86/Makefile while modifying 4 lines will be shown like this:

arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile    |   4 +--

The --numstat option gives the diffstat(1) information but is designed for easier machine consumption. An entry in --numstat output looks like this:

1       2       README
3       1       arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile

That is, from left to right:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. pathname (possibly with rename/copy information);
  6. a newline.

When -z output option is in effect, the output is formatted this way:

1       2       README NUL
3       1       NUL arch/i386/Makefile NUL arch/x86/Makefile NUL

That is:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  6. pathname in preimage;
  7. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  8. pathname in postimage (only exists if renamed/copied);
  9. a NUL.

The extra NUL before the preimage path in renamed case is to allow scripts that read the output to tell if the current record being read is a single-path record or a rename/copy record without reading ahead. After reading added and deleted lines, reading up to NUL would yield the pathname, but if that is NUL, the record will show two paths.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-diff(1)

NAME

git-diff - Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc

SYNOPSIS

git diff [<options>] [<commit>] [--] [<path>]
git diff [<options>--cached [--merge-base] [<commit>] [--] [<path>]
git diff [<options>] [--merge-base<commit> [<commit><commit> [--] [<path>]
git diff [<options><commit><commit> [--] [<path>]
git diff [<options><blob> <blob>
git diff [<options>--no-index [--<path> <path>

DESCRIPTION

Show changes between the working tree and the index or a tree, changes between the index and a tree, changes between two trees, changes resulting from a merge, changes between two blob objects, or changes between two files on disk.

git diff [<options>] [--] [<path>...]
This form is to view the changes you made relative to the index (staging area for the next commit). In other words, the differences are what you could tell Git to further add to the index but you still haven't. You can stage these changes by using the section called “git-add(1)”.
git diff [<options>] --no-index [--] <path> <path>
This form is to compare the given two paths on the filesystem. You can omit the --no-index option when running the command in a working tree controlled by Git and at least one of the paths points outside the working tree, or when running the command outside a working tree controlled by Git. This form implies --exit-code.
git diff [<options>] --cached [--merge-base] [<commit>] [--] [<path>...]

This form is to view the changes you staged for the next commit relative to the named <commit>. Typically you would want comparison with the latest commit, so if you do not give <commit>, it defaults to HEAD. If HEAD does not exist (e.g. unborn branches) and <commit> is not given, it shows all staged changes. --staged is a synonym of --cached.

If --merge-base is given, instead of using <commit>, use the merge base of <commit> and HEAD. git diff --cached --merge-base A is equivalent to git diff --cached $(git merge-base A HEAD).

git diff [<options>] [--merge-base] <commit> [--] [<path>...]

This form is to view the changes you have in your working tree relative to the named <commit>. You can use HEAD to compare it with the latest commit, or a branch name to compare with the tip of a different branch.

If --merge-base is given, instead of using <commit>, use the merge base of <commit> and HEAD. git diff --merge-base A is equivalent to git diff $(git merge-base A HEAD).

git diff [<options>] [--merge-base] <commit> <commit> [--] [<path>...]

This is to view the changes between two arbitrary <commit>.

If --merge-base is given, use the merge base of the two commits for the "before" side. git diff --merge-base A B is equivalent to git diff $(git merge-base A B) B.

git diff [<options>] <commit> <commit>...<commit> [--] [<path>...]
This form is to view the results of a merge commit. The first listed <commit> must be the merge itself; the remaining two or more commits should be its parents. Convenient ways to produce the desired set of revisions are to use the suffixes @ and ^!. If A is a merge commit, then git diff A A^@, git diff A^! and git show A all give the same combined diff.
git diff [<options>] <commit>..<commit> [--] [<path>...]
This is synonymous to the earlier form (without the ..) for viewing the changes between two arbitrary <commit>. If <commit> on one side is omitted, it will have the same effect as using HEAD instead.
git diff [<options>] <commit>...<commit> [--] [<path>...]
This form is to view the changes on the branch containing and up to the second <commit>, starting at a common ancestor of both <commit>. git diff A...B is equivalent to git diff $(git merge-base A B) B. You can omit any one of <commit>, which has the same effect as using HEAD instead.

Just in case you are doing something exotic, it should be noted that all of the <commit> in the above description, except in the --merge-base case and in the last two forms that use .. notations, can be any <tree>. A tree of interest is the one pointed to by the ref named AUTO_MERGE, which is written by the ort merge strategy upon hitting merge conflicts (see the section called “git-merge(1)”). Comparing the working tree with AUTO_MERGE shows changes you've made so far to resolve textual conflicts (see the examples below).

For a more complete list of ways to spell <commit>, see "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”. However, diff is about comparing two endpoints, not ranges, and the range notations (<commit>..<commit> and <commit>...<commit>) do not mean a range as defined in the "SPECIFYING RANGES" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.

git diff [<options>] <blob> <blob>
This form is to view the differences between the raw contents of two blob objects.

OPTIONS

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”). This is the default.
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
Generate the diff in raw format.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

When --raw, --numstat, --name-only or --name-status has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto. It can be changed by the color.ui and color.diff configuration settings.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. It can be changed by the diff.colorMoved configuration setting. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. It can be set by the diff.colorMovedWS configuration setting. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--exit-code
Make the program exit with codes similar to diff(1). That is, it exits with 1 if there were differences and 0 means no differences.
--quiet
Disable all output of the program. Implies --exit-code. Disables execution of external diff helpers whose exit code is not trusted, i.e. their respective configuration option diff.trustExitCode or diff.<driver>.trustExitCode or environment variable GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF_TRUST_EXIT_CODE is false.
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

-1 , --base , -2 , --ours , -3 , --theirs

Compare the working tree with

  • the "base" version (stage #1) when using -1 or --base,
  • "our branch" (stage #2) when using -2 or --ours, or
  • "their branch" (stage #3) when using -3 or --theirs.

The index contains these stages only for unmerged entries i.e. while resolving conflicts. See the section called “git-read-tree(1)” section "3-Way Merge" for detailed information.

-0
Omit diff output for unmerged entries and just show "Unmerged". Can be used only when comparing the working tree with the index.
<path>...
The <path> parameters, when given, are used to limit the diff to the named paths (you can give directory names and get diff for all files under them).

Raw output format

The raw output format from git-diff-index, git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git diff --raw are very similar.

These commands all compare two sets of things; what is compared differs:

git-diff-index <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the files on the filesystem.
git-diff-index --cached <tree-ish>
compares the <tree-ish> and the index.
git-diff-tree [-r] <tree-ish-1> <tree-ish-2> [<pattern>...]
compares the trees named by the two arguments.
git-diff-files [<pattern>...]
compares the index and the files on the filesystem.

The git-diff-tree command begins its output by printing the hash of what is being compared. After that, all the commands print one output line per changed file.

An output line is formatted this way:

in-place edit  :100644 100644 bcd1234 0123456 M file0
copy-edit      :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 C68 file1 file2
rename-edit    :100644 100644 abcd123 1234567 R86 file1 file3
create         :000000 100644 0000000 1234567 A file4
delete         :100644 000000 1234567 0000000 D file5
unmerged       :000000 000000 0000000 0000000 U file6

That is, from the left to the right:

  1. a colon.
  2. mode for "src"; 000000 if creation or unmerged.
  3. a space.
  4. mode for "dst"; 000000 if deletion or unmerged.
  5. a space.
  6. sha1 for "src"; 0{40} if creation or unmerged.
  7. a space.
  8. sha1 for "dst"; 0{40} if deletion, unmerged or "work tree out of sync with the index".
  9. a space.
  10. status, followed by optional "score" number.
  11. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used.
  12. path for "src"
  13. a tab or a NUL when -z option is used; only exists for C or R.
  14. path for "dst"; only exists for C or R.
  15. an LF or a NUL when -z option is used, to terminate the record.

Possible status letters are:

  • A: addition of a file
  • C: copy of a file into a new one
  • D: deletion of a file
  • M: modification of the contents or mode of a file
  • R: renaming of a file
  • T: change in the type of the file (regular file, symbolic link or submodule)
  • U: file is unmerged (you must complete the merge before it can be committed)
  • X: "unknown" change type (most probably a bug, please report it)

Status letters C and R are always followed by a score (denoting the percentage of similarity between the source and target of the move or copy). Status letter M may be followed by a score (denoting the percentage of dissimilarity) for file rewrites.

The sha1 for "dst" is shown as all 0's if a file on the filesystem is out of sync with the index.

Example:

:100644 100644 5be4a4a 0000000 M file.c

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

diff format for merges

git-diff-tree, git-diff-files and git-diff --raw can take -c or --cc option to generate diff output also for merge commits. The output differs from the format described above in the following way:

  1. there is a colon for each parent
  2. there are more "src" modes and "src" sha1
  3. status is concatenated status characters for each parent
  4. no optional "score" number
  5. tab-separated pathname(s) of the file

For -c and --cc, only the destination or final path is shown even if the file was renamed on any side of history. With --combined-all-paths, the name of the path in each parent is shown followed by the name of the path in the merge commit.

Examples for -c and --cc without --combined-all-paths:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       phooey.c

Examples when --combined-all-paths added to either -c or --cc:

::100644 100644 100644 fabadb8 cc95eb0 4866510 MM       desc.c  desc.c  desc.c
::100755 100755 100755 52b7a2d 6d1ac04 d2ac7d7 RM       foo.sh  bar.sh  bar.sh
::100644 100644 100644 e07d6c5 9042e82 ee91881 RR       fooey.c fuey.c  phooey.c

Note that combined diff lists only files which were modified from all parents.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

other diff formats

The --summary option describes newly added, deleted, renamed and copied files. The --stat option adds diffstat(1) graph to the output. These options can be combined with other options, such as -p, and are meant for human consumption.

When showing a change that involves a rename or a copy, --stat output formats the pathnames compactly by combining common prefix and suffix of the pathnames. For example, a change that moves arch/i386/Makefile to arch/x86/Makefile while modifying 4 lines will be shown like this:

arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile    |   4 +--

The --numstat option gives the diffstat(1) information but is designed for easier machine consumption. An entry in --numstat output looks like this:

1       2       README
3       1       arch/{i386 => x86}/Makefile

That is, from left to right:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. pathname (possibly with rename/copy information);
  6. a newline.

When -z output option is in effect, the output is formatted this way:

1       2       README NUL
3       1       NUL arch/i386/Makefile NUL arch/x86/Makefile NUL

That is:

  1. the number of added lines;
  2. a tab;
  3. the number of deleted lines;
  4. a tab;
  5. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  6. pathname in preimage;
  7. a NUL (only exists if renamed/copied);
  8. pathname in postimage (only exists if renamed/copied);
  9. a NUL.

The extra NUL before the preimage path in renamed case is to allow scripts that read the output to tell if the current record being read is a single-path record or a rename/copy record without reading ahead. After reading added and deleted lines, reading up to NUL would yield the pathname, but if that is NUL, the record will show two paths.

EXAMPLES

Various ways to check your working tree
$ git diff            1
$ git diff --cached   2
$ git diff HEAD       3
$ git diff AUTO_MERGE 4

1

Changes in the working tree not yet staged for the next commit.

2

Changes between the index and your last commit; what you would be committing if you run git commit without -a option.

3

Changes in the working tree since your last commit; what you would be committing if you run git commit -a

4

Changes in the working tree you've made to resolve textual conflicts so far.

Comparing with arbitrary commits
$ git diff test            1
$ git diff HEAD -- ./test  2
$ git diff HEAD^ HEAD      3

1

Instead of using the tip of the current branch, compare with the tip of "test" branch.

2

Instead of comparing with the tip of "test" branch, compare with the tip of the current branch, but limit the comparison to the file "test".

3

Compare the version before the last commit and the last commit.

Comparing branches
$ git diff topic master    1
$ git diff topic..master   2
$ git diff topic...master  3

1

Changes between the tips of the topic and the master branches.

2

Same as above.

3

Changes that occurred on the master branch since when the topic branch was started off it.

Limiting the diff output
$ git diff --diff-filter=MRC            1
$ git diff --name-status                2
$ git diff arch/i386 include/asm-i386   3

1

Show only modification, rename, and copy, but not addition or deletion.

2

Show only names and the nature of change, but not actual diff output.

3

Limit diff output to named subtrees.

Munging the diff output
$ git diff --find-copies-harder -B -C  1
$ git diff -R                          2

1

Spend extra cycles to find renames, copies and complete rewrites (very expensive).

2

Output diff in reverse.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

diff.autoRefreshIndex
When using git diff to compare with work tree files, do not consider stat-only changes as changed. Instead, silently run git update-index --refresh to update the cached stat information for paths whose contents in the work tree match the contents in the index. This option defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files.
diff.dirstat

A comma separated list of --dirstat parameters specifying the default behavior of the --dirstat option to git diff and friends. The defaults can be overridden on the command line (using --dirstat=<param>,...). The fallback defaults (when not changed by diff.dirstat) are changes,noncumulative,3. The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: files,10,cumulative.

diff.statNameWidth
Limit the width of the filename part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.
diff.statGraphWidth
Limit the width of the graph part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.
diff.context
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the default of 3. This value is overridden by the -U option.
diff.interHunkContext
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing the hunks that are close to each other. This value serves as the default for the --inter-hunk-context command line option.
diff.external
If this config variable is set, diff generation is not performed using the internal diff machinery, but using the given command. Can be overridden with the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable. The command is called with parameters as described under "git Diffs" in the section called “git(1)”. Note: if you want to use an external diff program only on a subset of your files, you might want to use the section called “gitattributes(5)” instead.
diff.trustExitCode
If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.external command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.
diff.ignoreSubmodules
Sets the default value of --ignore-submodules. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files. git checkout and git switch also honor this setting when reporting uncommitted changes. Setting it to all disables the submodule summary normally shown by git commit and git status when status.submoduleSummary is set unless it is overridden by using the --ignore-submodules command-line option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting. By default this is set to untracked so that any untracked submodules are ignored.
diff.mnemonicPrefix

If set, git diff uses a prefix pair that is different from the standard a/ and b/ depending on what is being compared. When this configuration is in effect, reverse diff output also swaps the order of the prefixes:

git diff
compares the (i)ndex and the (w)ork tree;
git diff HEAD
compares a (c)ommit and the (w)ork tree;
git diff --cached
compares a (c)ommit and the (i)ndex;
git diff HEAD:<file1> <file2>
compares an (o)bject and a (w)ork tree entity;
git diff --no-index <a> <b>
compares two non-git things <a> and <b>.
diff.noPrefix
If set, git diff does not show any source or destination prefix.
diff.srcPrefix
If set, git diff uses this source prefix. Defaults to a/.
diff.dstPrefix
If set, git diff uses this destination prefix. Defaults to b/.
diff.relative
If set to true, git diff does not show changes outside of the directory and show pathnames relative to the current directory.
diff.orderFile
File indicating how to order files within a diff. See the -O option for details. If diff.orderFile is a relative pathname, it is treated as relative to the top of the working tree.
diff.renameLimit
The number of files to consider in the exhaustive portion of copy/rename detection; equivalent to the git diff option -l. If not set, the default value is currently 1000. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.
diff.renames
Whether and how Git detects renames. If set to false, rename detection is disabled. If set to true, basic rename detection is enabled. If set to copies or copy, Git will detect copies, as well. Defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain like the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, and not lower level commands such as the section called “git-diff-files(1)”.
diff.suppressBlankEmpty
A boolean to inhibit the standard behavior of printing a space before each empty output line. Defaults to false.
diff.submodule
Specify the format in which differences in submodules are shown. The short format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. The log format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. The diff format shows an inline diff of the changed contents of the submodule. Defaults to short.
diff.wordRegex
A POSIX Extended Regular Expression used to determine what is a "word" when performing word-by-word difference calculations. Character sequences that match the regular expression are "words", all other characters are ignorable whitespace.
diff.<driver>.command
The custom diff driver command. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.trustExitCode
If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.<driver>.command command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.
diff.<driver>.xfuncname
The regular expression that the diff driver should use to recognize the hunk header. A built-in pattern may also be used. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.binary
Set this option to true to make the diff driver treat files as binary. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.textconv
The command that the diff driver should call to generate the text-converted version of a file. The result of the conversion is used to generate a human-readable diff. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.wordRegex
The regular expression that the diff driver should use to split words in a line. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.<driver>.cachetextconv
Set this option to true to make the diff driver cache the text conversion outputs. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
diff.indentHeuristic
Set this option to false to disable the default heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.
diff.algorithm

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".
diff.wsErrorHighlight
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace. The command line option --ws-error-highlight=<kind> overrides this setting.
diff.colorMoved
If set to either a valid <mode> or a true value, moved lines in a diff are colored differently. For details of valid modes see --color-moved. If simply set to true the default color mode will be used. When set to false, moved lines are not colored.
diff.colorMovedWS
When moved lines are colored using e.g. the diff.colorMoved setting, this option controls the mode how spaces are treated. For details of valid modes see --color-moved-ws in the section called “git-diff(1)”.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-difftool(1)

NAME

git-difftool - Show changes using common diff tools

SYNOPSIS

git difftool [<options>] [<commit> [<commit>]] [--] [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

git difftool is a Git command that allows you to compare and edit files between revisions using common diff tools. git difftool is a frontend to git diff and accepts the same options and arguments. See the section called “git-diff(1)”.

OPTIONS

-d , --dir-diff
Copy the modified files to a temporary location and perform a directory diff on them. This mode never prompts before launching the diff tool.
-y , --no-prompt
Do not prompt before launching a diff tool.
--prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool. This is the default behaviour; the option is provided to override any configuration settings.
--rotate-to=<file>
Start showing the diff for the given path, the paths before it will move to the end and output.
--skip-to=<file>
Start showing the diff for the given path, skipping all the paths before it.
-t <tool> , --tool=<tool>

Use the diff tool specified by <tool>. Valid values include emerge, kompare, meld, and vimdiff. Run git difftool --tool-help for the list of valid <tool> settings.

If a diff tool is not specified, git difftool will use the configuration variable diff.tool. If the configuration variable diff.tool is not set, git difftool will pick a suitable default.

You can explicitly provide a full path to the tool by setting the configuration variable difftool.<tool>.path. For example, you can configure the absolute path to kdiff3 by setting difftool.kdiff3.path. Otherwise, git difftool assumes the tool is available in PATH.

Instead of running one of the known diff tools, git difftool can be customized to run an alternative program by specifying the command line to invoke in a configuration variable difftool.<tool>.cmd.

When git difftool is invoked with this tool (either through the -t or --tool option or the diff.tool configuration variable) the configured command line will be invoked with the following variables available: $LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and $REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image. $MERGED is the name of the file which is being compared. $BASE is provided for compatibility with custom merge tool commands and has the same value as $MERGED.

--tool-help
Print a list of diff tools that may be used with --tool.
--[no-]symlinks

git difftool's default behavior is to create symlinks to the working tree when run in --dir-diff mode and the right-hand side of the comparison yields the same content as the file in the working tree.

Specifying --no-symlinks instructs git difftool to create copies instead. --no-symlinks is the default on Windows.

-x <command> , --extcmd=<command>
Specify a custom command for viewing diffs. git-difftool ignores the configured defaults and runs <command> $LOCAL $REMOTE when this option is specified. Additionally, $BASE is set in the environment.
-g , --[no-]gui
When git-difftool is invoked with the -g or --gui option the default diff tool will be read from the configured diff.guitool variable instead of diff.tool. This may be selected automatically using the configuration variable difftool.guiDefault. The --no-gui option can be used to override these settings. If diff.guitool is not set, we will fallback in the order of merge.guitool, diff.tool, merge.tool until a tool is found.
--[no-]trust-exit-code

Errors reported by the diff tool are ignored by default. Use --trust-exit-code to make git-difftool exit when an invoked diff tool returns a non-zero exit code.

git-difftool will forward the exit code of the invoked tool when --trust-exit-code is used.

See the section called “git-diff(1)” for the full list of supported options.

CONFIGURATION

git difftool falls back to git mergetool config variables when the difftool equivalents have not been defined.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

diff.tool
Controls which diff tool is used by the section called “git-difftool(1)”. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.tool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.
diff.guitool

Controls which diff tool is used by the section called “git-difftool(1)” when the -g/--gui flag is specified. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.guitool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
Use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
bc
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc3
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc4
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
codecompare
Use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
deltawalker
Use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
diffmerge
Use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
diffuse
Use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
ecmerge
Use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
emerge
Use Emacs' Emerge
examdiff
Use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
guiffy
Use Guiffy's Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
gvimdiff
Use gVim (requires a graphical session)
kdiff3
Use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
kompare
Use Kompare (requires a graphical session)
meld
Use Meld (requires a graphical session)
nvimdiff
Use Neovim
opendiff
Use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
p4merge
Use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
smerge
Use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
tkdiff
Use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
vimdiff
Use Vim
vscode
Use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
winmerge
Use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
xxdiff
Use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
difftool.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified diff tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image.

See the --tool=<tool> option in the section called “git-difftool(1)” for more details.

difftool.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH.
difftool.trustExitCode

Exit difftool if the invoked diff tool returns a non-zero exit status.

See the --trust-exit-code option in the section called “git-difftool(1)” for more details.

difftool.prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.
difftool.guiDefault
Set true to use the diff.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select diff.guitool or diff.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the diff.guitool to be used.

SEE ALSO

the section called “git-diff(1)”
Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc
the section called “git-mergetool(1)”
Run merge conflict resolution tools to resolve merge conflicts
the section called “git-config(1)”
Get and set repository or global options

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fast-export(1)

NAME

git-fast-export - Git data exporter

SYNOPSIS

git fast-export [<options>] | git fast-import

DESCRIPTION

This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped into git fast-import.

You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see the section called “git-bundle(1)”), or as a format that can be edited before being fed to git fast-import in order to do history rewrites (an ability relied on by tools like git filter-repo).

OPTIONS

--progress=<n>
Insert progress statements every <n> objects, to be shown by git fast-import during import.
--signed-tags=(verbatim|warn-verbatim|warn-strip|strip|abort)

Specify how to handle signed tags. Since any transformation after the export (or during the export, such as excluding revisions) can change the hashes being signed, the signatures may become invalid.

When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die when encountering a signed tag. With strip, the tags will silently be made unsigned, with warn-strip they will be made unsigned but a warning will be displayed, with verbatim, they will be silently exported and with warn-verbatim (or warn, a deprecated synonym), they will be exported, but you will see a warning. verbatim and warn-verbatim should only be used if you know that no transformation affecting tags or any commit in their history will be performed by you or by fast-export or fast-import, or if you do not care that the resulting tag will have an invalid signature.

--signed-commits=(verbatim|warn-verbatim|warn-strip|strip|abort)

Specify how to handle signed commits. Behaves exactly as --signed-tags, but for commits. Default is strip, which is the same as how earlier versions of this command without this option behaved.

Note

This is highly experimental and the format of the data stream may change in the future without compatibility guarantees.

--tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)

Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out. Since revisions and files to export can be limited by path, tagged objects may be filtered completely.

When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die when encountering such a tag. With drop it will omit such tags from the output. With rewrite, if the tagged object is a commit, it will rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent rewriting; see the section called “git-rev-list(1)”).

-M , -C

Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the the section called “git-diff(1)” manual page, and use it to generate rename and copy commands in the output dump.

Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and produced incorrect results if you gave these options.

--export-marks=<file>
Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete. Marks are written one per line as :markid SHA-1. Only marks for revisions are dumped; marks for blobs are ignored. Backends can use this file to validate imports after they have been completed, or to save the marks table across incremental runs. As <file> is only opened and truncated at completion, the same path can also be safely given to --import-marks. The file will not be written if no new object has been marked/exported.
--import-marks=<file>
Before processing any input, load the marks specified in <file>. The input file must exist, must be readable, and must use the same format as produced by --export-marks.
--mark-tags

In addition to labelling blobs and commits with mark ids, also label tags. This is useful in conjunction with --export-marks and --import-marks, and is also useful (and necessary) for exporting of nested tags. It does not hurt other cases and would be the default, but many fast-import frontends are not prepared to accept tags with mark identifiers.

Any commits (or tags) that have already been marked will not be exported again. If the backend uses a similar --import-marks file, this allows for incremental bidirectional exporting of the repository by keeping the marks the same across runs.

--fake-missing-tagger
Some old repositories have tags without a tagger. The fast-import protocol was pretty strict about that, and did not allow that. So fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the output.
--use-done-feature
Start the stream with a feature done stanza, and terminate it with a done command.
--no-data
Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via their original SHA-1 hash. This is useful when rewriting the directory structure or history of a repository without touching the contents of individual files. Note that the resulting stream can only be used by a repository which already contains the necessary objects.
--full-tree
This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall" directive for each commit followed by a full list of all files in the commit (as opposed to just listing the files which are different from the commit's first parent).
--anonymize
Anonymize the contents of the repository while still retaining the shape of the history and stored tree. See the section on ANONYMIZING below.
--anonymize-map=<from>[:<to>]
Convert token <from> to <to> in the anonymized output. If <to> is omitted, map <from> to itself (i.e., do not anonymize it). See the section on ANONYMIZING below.
--reference-excluded-parents
By default, running a command such as git fast-export master~5..master will not include the commit master~5 and will make master~4 no longer have master~5 as a parent (though both the old master~4 and new master~4 will have all the same files). Use --reference-excluded-parents to instead have the stream refer to commits in the excluded range of history by their sha1sum. Note that the resulting stream can only be used by a repository which already contains the necessary parent commits.
--show-original-ids
Add an extra directive to the output for commits and blobs, original-oid <SHA1SUM>. While such directives will likely be ignored by importers such as git-fast-import, it may be useful for intermediary filters (e.g. for rewriting commit messages which refer to older commits, or for stripping blobs by id).
--reencode=(yes|no|abort)
Specify how to handle encoding header in commit objects. When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die when encountering such a commit object. With yes, the commit message will be re-encoded into UTF-8. With no, the original encoding will be preserved.
--refspec
Apply the specified refspec to each ref exported. Multiple of them can be specified.
[<git-rev-list-args>…]
A list of arguments, acceptable to git rev-parse and git rev-list, that specifies the specific objects and references to export. For example, master~10..master causes the current master reference to be exported along with all objects added since its 10th ancestor commit and (unless the --reference-excluded-parents option is specified) all files common to master~9 and master~10.

EXAMPLES

$ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)

This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing empty repository. Except for reencoding commits that are not in UTF-8, it would be a one-to-one mirror.

$ git fast-export master~5..master |
        sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
        git fast-import

This makes a new branch called other from master~5..master (i.e. if master has linear history, it will take the last 5 commits).

Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages referenced by that revision range contains the string refs/heads/master.

ANONYMIZING

If the --anonymize option is given, git will attempt to remove all identifying information from the repository while still retaining enough of the original tree and history patterns to reproduce some bugs. The goal is that a git bug which is found on a private repository will persist in the anonymized repository, and the latter can be shared with git developers to help solve the bug.

With this option, git will replace all refnames, paths, blob contents, commit and tag messages, names, and email addresses in the output with anonymized data. Two instances of the same string will be replaced equivalently (e.g., two commits with the same author will have the same anonymized author in the output, but bear no resemblance to the original author string). The relationship between commits, branches, and tags is retained, as well as the commit timestamps (but the commit messages and refnames bear no resemblance to the originals). The relative makeup of the tree is retained (e.g., if you have a root tree with 10 files and 3 trees, so will the output), but their names and the contents of the files will be replaced.

If you think you have found a git bug, you can start by exporting an anonymized stream of the whole repository:

$ git fast-export --anonymize --all >anon-stream

Then confirm that the bug persists in a repository created from that stream (many bugs will not, as they really do depend on the exact repository contents):

$ git init anon-repo
$ cd anon-repo
$ git fast-import <../anon-stream
$ ... test your bug ...

If the anonymized repository shows the bug, it may be worth sharing anon-stream along with a regular bug report. Note that the anonymized stream compresses very well, so gzipping it is encouraged. If you want to examine the stream to see that it does not contain any private data, you can peruse it directly before sending. You may also want to try:

$ perl -pe 's/\d+/X/g' <anon-stream | sort -u | less

which shows all of the unique lines (with numbers converted to "X", to collapse "User 0", "User 1", etc into "User X"). This produces a much smaller output, and it is usually easy to quickly confirm that there is no private data in the stream.

Reproducing some bugs may require referencing particular commits or paths, which becomes challenging after refnames and paths have been anonymized. You can ask for a particular token to be left as-is or mapped to a new value. For example, if you have a bug which reproduces with git rev-list sensitive -- secret.c, you can run:

$ git fast-export --anonymize --all \
      --anonymize-map=sensitive:foo \
      --anonymize-map=secret.c:bar.c \
      >stream

After importing the stream, you can then run git rev-list foo -- bar.c in the anonymized repository.

Note that paths and refnames are split into tokens at slash boundaries. The command above would anonymize subdir/secret.c as something like path123/bar.c; you could then search for bar.c in the anonymized repository to determine the final pathname.

To make referencing the final pathname simpler, you can map each path component; so if you also anonymize subdir to publicdir, then the final pathname would be publicdir/bar.c.

LIMITATIONS

Since git fast-import cannot tag trees, you will not be able to export the linux.git repository completely, as it contains a tag referencing a tree instead of a commit.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fast-import(1)

NAME

git-fast-import - Backend for fast Git data importers

SYNOPSIS

frontend | git fast-import [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

This program is usually not what the end user wants to run directly. Most end users want to use one of the existing frontend programs, which parses a specific type of foreign source and feeds the contents stored there to git fast-import.

fast-import reads a mixed command/data stream from standard input and writes one or more packfiles directly into the current repository. When EOF is received on standard input, fast import writes out updated branch and tag refs, fully updating the current repository with the newly imported data.

The fast-import backend itself can import into an empty repository (one that has already been initialized by git init) or incrementally update an existing populated repository. Whether or not incremental imports are supported from a particular foreign source depends on the frontend program in use.

OPTIONS

--force
Force updating modified existing branches, even if doing so would cause commits to be lost (as the new commit does not contain the old commit).
--quiet
Disable the output shown by --stats, making fast-import usually be silent when it is successful. However, if the import stream has directives intended to show user output (e.g. progress directives), the corresponding messages will still be shown.
--stats
Display some basic statistics about the objects fast-import has created, the packfiles they were stored into, and the memory used by fast-import during this run. Showing this output is currently the default, but can be disabled with --quiet.
--allow-unsafe-features

Many command-line options can be provided as part of the fast-import stream itself by using the feature or option commands. However, some of these options are unsafe (e.g., allowing fast-import to access the filesystem outside of the repository). These options are disabled by default, but can be allowed by providing this option on the command line. This currently impacts only the export-marks, import-marks, and import-marks-if-exists feature commands.

Only enable this option if you trust the program generating the
fast-import stream! This option is enabled automatically for
remote-helpers that use the `import` capability, as they are
already trusted to run their own code.

Options for Frontends

--cat-blob-fd=<fd>
Write responses to get-mark, cat-blob, and ls queries to the file descriptor <fd> instead of stdout. Allows progress output intended for the end-user to be separated from other output.
--date-format=<fmt>
Specify the type of dates the frontend will supply to fast-import within author, committer and tagger commands. See Date Formats below for details about which formats are supported, and their syntax.
--done
Terminate with error if there is no done command at the end of the stream. This option might be useful for detecting errors that cause the frontend to terminate before it has started to write a stream.

Locations of Marks Files

--export-marks=<file>
Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete. Marks are written one per line as :markid SHA-1. Frontends can use this file to validate imports after they have been completed, or to save the marks table across incremental runs. As <file> is only opened and truncated at checkpoint (or completion) the same path can also be safely given to --import-marks.
--import-marks=<file>
Before processing any input, load the marks specified in <file>. The input file must exist, must be readable, and must use the same format as produced by --export-marks. Multiple options may be supplied to import more than one set of marks. If a mark is defined to different values, the last file wins.
--import-marks-if-exists=<file>
Like --import-marks but instead of erroring out, silently skips the file if it does not exist.
--[no-]relative-marks

After specifying --relative-marks the paths specified with --import-marks= and --export-marks= are relative to an internal directory in the current repository. In git-fast-import this means that the paths are relative to the .git/info/fast-import directory. However, other importers may use a different location.

Relative and non-relative marks may be combined by interweaving --(no-)-relative-marks with the --(import|export)-marks= options.

Submodule Rewriting

--rewrite-submodules-from=<name>:<file> , --rewrite-submodules-to=<name>:<file>

Rewrite the object IDs for the submodule specified by <name> from the values used in the from <file> to those used in the to <file>. The from marks should have been created by git fast-export, and the to marks should have been created by git fast-import when importing that same submodule.

<name> may be any arbitrary string not containing a colon character, but the same value must be used with both options when specifying corresponding marks. Multiple submodules may be specified with different values for <name>. It is an error not to use these options in corresponding pairs.

These options are primarily useful when converting a repository from one hash algorithm to another; without them, fast-import will fail if it encounters a submodule because it has no way of writing the object ID into the new hash algorithm.

Performance and Compression Tuning

--active-branches=<n>
Maximum number of branches to maintain active at once. See Memory Utilization below for details. Default is 5.
--big-file-threshold=<n>
Maximum size of a blob that fast-import will attempt to create a delta for, expressed in bytes. The default is 512m (512 MiB). Some importers may wish to lower this on systems with constrained memory.
--depth=<n>
Maximum delta depth, for blob and tree deltification. Default is 50.
--export-pack-edges=<file>
After creating a packfile, print a line of data to <file> listing the filename of the packfile and the last commit on each branch that was written to that packfile. This information may be useful after importing projects whose total object set exceeds the 4 GiB packfile limit, as these commits can be used as edge points during calls to git pack-objects.
--max-pack-size=<n>
Maximum size of each output packfile. The default is unlimited.
fastimport.unpackLimit
See the section called “git-config(1)”

PERFORMANCE

The design of fast-import allows it to import large projects in a minimum amount of memory usage and processing time. Assuming the frontend is able to keep up with fast-import and feed it a constant stream of data, import times for projects holding 10+ years of history and containing 100,000+ individual commits are generally completed in just 1-2 hours on quite modest (~$2,000 USD) hardware.

Most bottlenecks appear to be in foreign source data access (the source just cannot extract revisions fast enough) or disk IO (fast-import writes as fast as the disk will take the data). Imports will run faster if the source data is stored on a different drive than the destination Git repository (due to less IO contention).

DEVELOPMENT COST

A typical frontend for fast-import tends to weigh in at approximately 200 lines of Perl/Python/Ruby code. Most developers have been able to create working importers in just a couple of hours, even though it is their first exposure to fast-import, and sometimes even to Git. This is an ideal situation, given that most conversion tools are throw-away (use once, and never look back).

PARALLEL OPERATION

Like git push or git fetch, imports handled by fast-import are safe to run alongside parallel git repack -a -d or git gc invocations, or any other Git operation (including git prune, as loose objects are never used by fast-import).

fast-import does not lock the branch or tag refs it is actively importing. After the import, during its ref update phase, fast-import tests each existing branch ref to verify the update will be a fast-forward update (the commit stored in the ref is contained in the new history of the commit to be written). If the update is not a fast-forward update, fast-import will skip updating that ref and instead prints a warning message. fast-import will always attempt to update all branch refs, and does not stop on the first failure.

Branch updates can be forced with --force, but it's recommended that this only be used on an otherwise quiet repository. Using --force is not necessary for an initial import into an empty repository.

TECHNICAL DISCUSSION

fast-import tracks a set of branches in memory. Any branch can be created or modified at any point during the import process by sending a commit command on the input stream. This design allows a frontend program to process an unlimited number of branches simultaneously, generating commits in the order they are available from the source data. It also simplifies the frontend programs considerably.

fast-import does not use or alter the current working directory, or any file within it. (It does however update the current Git repository, as referenced by GIT_DIR.) Therefore an import frontend may use the working directory for its own purposes, such as extracting file revisions from the foreign source. This ignorance of the working directory also allows fast-import to run very quickly, as it does not need to perform any costly file update operations when switching between branches.

INPUT FORMAT

With the exception of raw file data (which Git does not interpret) the fast-import input format is text (ASCII) based. This text based format simplifies development and debugging of frontend programs, especially when a higher level language such as Perl, Python or Ruby is being used.

fast-import is very strict about its input. Where we say SP below we mean exactly one space. Likewise LF means one (and only one) linefeed and HT one (and only one) horizontal tab. Supplying additional whitespace characters will cause unexpected results, such as branch names or file names with leading or trailing spaces in their name, or early termination of fast-import when it encounters unexpected input.

Stream Comments

To aid in debugging frontends fast-import ignores any line that begins with # (ASCII pound/hash) up to and including the line ending LF. A comment line may contain any sequence of bytes that does not contain an LF and therefore may be used to include any detailed debugging information that might be specific to the frontend and useful when inspecting a fast-import data stream.

Date Formats

The following date formats are supported. A frontend should select the format it will use for this import by passing the format name in the --date-format=<fmt> command-line option.

raw

This is the Git native format and is <time> SP <offutc>. It is also fast-import's default format, if --date-format was not specified.

The time of the event is specified by <time> as the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch (midnight, Jan 1, 1970, UTC) and is written as an ASCII decimal integer.

The local offset is specified by <offutc> as a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example EST (which is 5 hours behind UTC) would be expressed in <tz> by -0500 while UTC is +0000. The local offset does not affect <time>; it is used only as an advisement to help formatting routines display the timestamp.

If the local offset is not available in the source material, use +0000, or the most common local offset. For example many organizations have a CVS repository which has only ever been accessed by users who are located in the same location and time zone. In this case a reasonable offset from UTC could be assumed.

Unlike the rfc2822 format, this format is very strict. Any variation in formatting will cause fast-import to reject the value, and some sanity checks on the numeric values may also be performed.

raw-permissive
This is the same as raw except that no sanity checks on the numeric epoch and local offset are performed. This can be useful when trying to filter or import an existing history with e.g. bogus timezone values.
rfc2822

This is the standard date format as described by RFC 2822.

An example value is Tue Feb 6 11:22:18 2007 -0500. The Git parser is accurate, but a little on the lenient side. It is the same parser used by git am when applying patches received from email.

Some malformed strings may be accepted as valid dates. In some of these cases Git will still be able to obtain the correct date from the malformed string. There are also some types of malformed strings which Git will parse wrong, and yet consider valid. Seriously malformed strings will be rejected.

Unlike the raw format above, the time zone/UTC offset information contained in an RFC 2822 date string is used to adjust the date value to UTC prior to storage. Therefore it is important that this information be as accurate as possible.

If the source material uses RFC 2822 style dates, the frontend should let fast-import handle the parsing and conversion (rather than attempting to do it itself) as the Git parser has been well tested in the wild.

Frontends should prefer the raw format if the source material already uses UNIX-epoch format, can be coaxed to give dates in that format, or its format is easily convertible to it, as there is no ambiguity in parsing.

now

Always use the current time and time zone. The literal now must always be supplied for <when>.

This is a toy format. The current time and time zone of this system is always copied into the identity string at the time it is being created by fast-import. There is no way to specify a different time or time zone.

This particular format is supplied as it's short to implement and may be useful to a process that wants to create a new commit right now, without needing to use a working directory or git update-index.

If separate author and committer commands are used in a commit the timestamps may not match, as the system clock will be polled twice (once for each command). The only way to ensure that both author and committer identity information has the same timestamp is to omit author (thus copying from committer) or to use a date format other than now.

Commands

fast-import accepts several commands to update the current repository and control the current import process. More detailed discussion (with examples) of each command follows later.

commit
Creates a new branch or updates an existing branch by creating a new commit and updating the branch to point at the newly created commit.
tag
Creates an annotated tag object from an existing commit or branch. Lightweight tags are not supported by this command, as they are not recommended for recording meaningful points in time.
reset
Reset an existing branch (or a new branch) to a specific revision. This command must be used to change a branch to a specific revision without making a commit on it.
blob
Convert raw file data into a blob, for future use in a commit command. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an import.
alias
Record that a mark refers to a given object without first creating any new object. Using --import-marks and referring to missing marks will cause fast-import to fail, so aliases can provide a way to set otherwise pruned commits to a valid value (e.g. the nearest non-pruned ancestor).
checkpoint
Forces fast-import to close the current packfile, generate its unique SHA-1 checksum and index, and start a new packfile. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an import.
progress
Causes fast-import to echo the entire line to its own standard output. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an import.
done
Marks the end of the stream. This command is optional unless the done feature was requested using the --done command-line option or feature done command.
get-mark
Causes fast-import to print the SHA-1 corresponding to a mark to the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd, or stdout if unspecified.
cat-blob
Causes fast-import to print a blob in cat-file --batch format to the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd or stdout if unspecified.
ls
Causes fast-import to print a line describing a directory entry in ls-tree format to the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd or stdout if unspecified.
feature
Enable the specified feature. This requires that fast-import supports the specified feature, and aborts if it does not.
option
Specify any of the options listed under OPTIONS that do not change stream semantic to suit the frontend's needs. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an import.

commit

Create or update a branch with a new commit, recording one logical change to the project.

        'commit' SP <ref> LF
        mark?
        original-oid?
        ('author' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF)?
        'committer' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF
        ('gpgsig' SP <alg> LF data)?
        ('encoding' SP <encoding> LF)?
        data
        ('from' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
        ('merge' SP <commit-ish> LF)*
        (filemodify | filedelete | filecopy | filerename | filedeleteall | notemodify)*
        LF?

where <ref> is the name of the branch to make the commit on. Typically branch names are prefixed with refs/heads/ in Git, so importing the CVS branch symbol RELENG-1_0 would use refs/heads/RELENG-1_0 for the value of <ref>. The value of <ref> must be a valid refname in Git. As LF is not valid in a Git refname, no quoting or escaping syntax is supported here.

A mark command may optionally appear, requesting fast-import to save a reference to the newly created commit for future use by the frontend (see below for format). It is very common for frontends to mark every commit they create, thereby allowing future branch creation from any imported commit.

The data command following committer must supply the commit message (see below for data command syntax). To import an empty commit message use a 0 length data. Commit messages are free-form and are not interpreted by Git. Currently they must be encoded in UTF-8, as fast-import does not permit other encodings to be specified.

Zero or more filemodify, filedelete, filecopy, filerename, filedeleteall and notemodify commands may be included to update the contents of the branch prior to creating the commit. These commands may be supplied in any order. However it is recommended that a filedeleteall command precede all filemodify, filecopy, filerename and notemodify commands in the same commit, as filedeleteall wipes the branch clean (see below).

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required). Note that for reasons of backward compatibility, if the commit ends with a data command (i.e. it has no from, merge, filemodify, filedelete, filecopy, filerename, filedeleteall or notemodify commands) then two LF commands may appear at the end of the command instead of just one.

author

An author command may optionally appear, if the author information might differ from the committer information. If author is omitted then fast-import will automatically use the committer's information for the author portion of the commit. See below for a description of the fields in author, as they are identical to committer.

committer

The committer command indicates who made this commit, and when they made it.

Here <name> is the person's display name (for example Com M Itter) and <email> is the person's email address (cm@example.com). LT and GT are the literal less-than (\x3c) and greater-than (\x3e) symbols. These are required to delimit the email address from the other fields in the line. Note that <name> and <email> are free-form and may contain any sequence of bytes, except LT, GT and LF. <name> is typically UTF-8 encoded.

The time of the change is specified by <when> using the date format that was selected by the --date-format=<fmt> command-line option. See Date Formats above for the set of supported formats, and their syntax.

gpgsig

The optional gpgsig command is used to include a PGP/GPG signature that signs the commit data.

Here <alg> specifies which hashing algorithm is used for this signature, either sha1 or sha256.

Note

This is highly experimental and the format of the data stream may change in the future without compatibility guarantees.

encoding

The optional encoding command indicates the encoding of the commit message. Most commits are UTF-8 and the encoding is omitted, but this allows importing commit messages into git without first reencoding them.

from

The from command is used to specify the commit to initialize this branch from. This revision will be the first ancestor of the new commit. The state of the tree built at this commit will begin with the state at the from commit, and be altered by the content modifications in this commit.

Omitting the from command in the first commit of a new branch will cause fast-import to create that commit with no ancestor. This tends to be desired only for the initial commit of a project. If the frontend creates all files from scratch when making a new branch, a merge command may be used instead of from to start the commit with an empty tree. Omitting the from command on existing branches is usually desired, as the current commit on that branch is automatically assumed to be the first ancestor of the new commit.

As LF is not valid in a Git refname or SHA-1 expression, no quoting or escaping syntax is supported within <commit-ish>.

Here <commit-ish> is any of the following:

  • The name of an existing branch already in fast-import's internal branch table. If fast-import doesn't know the name, it's treated as a SHA-1 expression.
  • A mark reference, :<idnum>, where <idnum> is the mark number.

    The reason fast-import uses : to denote a mark reference is this character is not legal in a Git branch name. The leading : makes it easy to distinguish between the mark 42 (:42) and the branch 42 (42 or refs/heads/42), or an abbreviated SHA-1 which happened to consist only of base-10 digits.

    Marks must be declared (via mark) before they can be used.

  • A complete 40 byte or abbreviated commit SHA-1 in hex.
  • Any valid Git SHA-1 expression that resolves to a commit. See SPECIFYING REVISIONS in the section called “gitrevisions(7)” for details.
  • The special null SHA-1 (40 zeros) specifies that the branch is to be removed.

The special case of restarting an incremental import from the current branch value should be written as:

        from refs/heads/branch^0

The ^0 suffix is necessary as fast-import does not permit a branch to start from itself, and the branch is created in memory before the from command is even read from the input. Adding ^0 will force fast-import to resolve the commit through Git's revision parsing library, rather than its internal branch table, thereby loading in the existing value of the branch.

merge

Includes one additional ancestor commit. The additional ancestry link does not change the way the tree state is built at this commit. If the from command is omitted when creating a new branch, the first merge commit will be the first ancestor of the current commit, and the branch will start out with no files. An unlimited number of merge commands per commit are permitted by fast-import, thereby establishing an n-way merge.

Here <commit-ish> is any of the commit specification expressions also accepted by from (see above).

filemodify

Included in a commit command to add a new file or change the content of an existing file. This command has two different means of specifying the content of the file.

External data format

The data content for the file was already supplied by a prior blob command. The frontend just needs to connect it.

        'M' SP <mode> SP <dataref> SP <path> LF

Here usually <dataref> must be either a mark reference (:<idnum>) set by a prior blob command, or a full 40-byte SHA-1 of an existing Git blob object. If <mode> is 040000` then <dataref> must be the full 40-byte SHA-1 of an existing Git tree object or a mark reference set with --import-marks.

Inline data format

The data content for the file has not been supplied yet. The frontend wants to supply it as part of this modify command.

        'M' SP <mode> SP 'inline' SP <path> LF
        data

See below for a detailed description of the data command.

In both formats <mode> is the type of file entry, specified in octal. Git only supports the following modes:

  • 100644 or 644: A normal (not-executable) file. The majority of files in most projects use this mode. If in doubt, this is what you want.
  • 100755 or 755: A normal, but executable, file.
  • 120000: A symlink, the content of the file will be the link target.
  • 160000: A gitlink, SHA-1 of the object refers to a commit in another repository. Git links can only be specified either by SHA or through a commit mark. They are used to implement submodules.
  • 040000: A subdirectory. Subdirectories can only be specified by SHA or through a tree mark set with --import-marks.

In both formats <path> is the complete path of the file to be added (if not already existing) or modified (if already existing).

A <path> can be written as unquoted bytes or a C-style quoted string.

When a <path> does not start with a double quote ("), it is an unquoted string and is parsed as literal bytes without any escape sequences. However, if the filename contains LF or starts with double quote, it cannot be represented as an unquoted string and must be quoted. Additionally, the source <path> in filecopy or filerename must be quoted if it contains SP.

When a <path> starts with a double quote ("), it is a C-style quoted string, where the complete filename is enclosed in a pair of double quotes and escape sequences are used. Certain characters must be escaped by preceding them with a backslash: LF is written as \n, backslash as \\, and double quote as \". Some characters may optionally be written with escape sequences: \a for bell, \b for backspace, \f for form feed, \n for line feed, \r for carriage return, \t for horizontal tab, and \v for vertical tab. Any byte can be written with 3-digit octal codes (e.g., \033). All filenames can be represented as quoted strings.

A <path> must use UNIX-style directory separators (forward slash /) and its value must be in canonical form. That is it must not:

  • contain an empty directory component (e.g. foo//bar is invalid),
  • end with a directory separator (e.g. foo/ is invalid),
  • start with a directory separator (e.g. /foo is invalid),
  • contain the special component . or .. (e.g. foo/./bar and foo/../bar are invalid).

The root of the tree can be represented by an empty string as <path>.

<path> cannot contain NUL, either literally or escaped as \000. It is recommended that <path> always be encoded using UTF-8.

filedelete

Included in a commit command to remove a file or recursively delete an entire directory from the branch. If the file or directory removal makes its parent directory empty, the parent directory will be automatically removed too. This cascades up the tree until the first non-empty directory or the root is reached.

        'D' SP <path> LF

here <path> is the complete path of the file or subdirectory to be removed from the branch. See filemodify above for a detailed description of <path>.

filecopy

Recursively copies an existing file or subdirectory to a different location within the branch. The existing file or directory must exist. If the destination exists it will be completely replaced by the content copied from the source.

        'C' SP <path> SP <path> LF

here the first <path> is the source location and the second <path> is the destination. See filemodify above for a detailed description of what <path> may look like. To use a source path that contains SP the path must be quoted.

A filecopy command takes effect immediately. Once the source location has been copied to the destination any future commands applied to the source location will not impact the destination of the copy.

filerename

Renames an existing file or subdirectory to a different location within the branch. The existing file or directory must exist. If the destination exists it will be replaced by the source directory.

        'R' SP <path> SP <path> LF

here the first <path> is the source location and the second <path> is the destination. See filemodify above for a detailed description of what <path> may look like. To use a source path that contains SP the path must be quoted.

A filerename command takes effect immediately. Once the source location has been renamed to the destination any future commands applied to the source location will create new files there and not impact the destination of the rename.

Note that a filerename is the same as a filecopy followed by a filedelete of the source location. There is a slight performance advantage to using filerename, but the advantage is so small that it is never worth trying to convert a delete/add pair in source material into a rename for fast-import. This filerename command is provided just to simplify frontends that already have rename information and don't want bother with decomposing it into a filecopy followed by a filedelete.

filedeleteall

Included in a commit command to remove all files (and also all directories) from the branch. This command resets the internal branch structure to have no files in it, allowing the frontend to subsequently add all interesting files from scratch.

        'deleteall' LF

This command is extremely useful if the frontend does not know (or does not care to know) what files are currently on the branch, and therefore cannot generate the proper filedelete commands to update the content.

Issuing a filedeleteall followed by the needed filemodify commands to set the correct content will produce the same results as sending only the needed filemodify and filedelete commands. The filedeleteall approach may however require fast-import to use slightly more memory per active branch (less than 1 MiB for even most large projects); so frontends that can easily obtain only the affected paths for a commit are encouraged to do so.

notemodify

Included in a commit <notes-ref> command to add a new note annotating a <commit-ish> or change this annotation contents. Internally it is similar to filemodify 100644 on <commit-ish> path (maybe split into subdirectories). It's not advised to use any other commands to write to the <notes-ref> tree except filedeleteall to delete all existing notes in this tree. This command has two different means of specifying the content of the note.

External data format

The data content for the note was already supplied by a prior blob command. The frontend just needs to connect it to the commit that is to be annotated.

        'N' SP <dataref> SP <commit-ish> LF

Here <dataref> can be either a mark reference (:<idnum>) set by a prior blob command, or a full 40-byte SHA-1 of an existing Git blob object.

Inline data format

The data content for the note has not been supplied yet. The frontend wants to supply it as part of this modify command.

        'N' SP 'inline' SP <commit-ish> LF
        data

See below for a detailed description of the data command.

In both formats <commit-ish> is any of the commit specification expressions also accepted by from (see above).

mark

Arranges for fast-import to save a reference to the current object, allowing the frontend to recall this object at a future point in time, without knowing its SHA-1. Here the current object is the object creation command the mark command appears within. This can be commit, tag, and blob, but commit is the most common usage.

        'mark' SP ':' <idnum> LF

where <idnum> is the number assigned by the frontend to this mark. The value of <idnum> is expressed as an ASCII decimal integer. The value 0 is reserved and cannot be used as a mark. Only values greater than or equal to 1 may be used as marks.

New marks are created automatically. Existing marks can be moved to another object simply by reusing the same <idnum> in another mark command.

original-oid

Provides the name of the object in the original source control system. fast-import will simply ignore this directive, but filter processes which operate on and modify the stream before feeding to fast-import may have uses for this information

        'original-oid' SP <object-identifier> LF

where <object-identifier> is any string not containing LF.

tag

Creates an annotated tag referring to a specific commit. To create lightweight (non-annotated) tags see the reset command below.

        'tag' SP <name> LF
        mark?
        'from' SP <commit-ish> LF
        original-oid?
        'tagger' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF
        data

where <name> is the name of the tag to create.

Tag names are automatically prefixed with refs/tags/ when stored in Git, so importing the CVS branch symbol RELENG-1_0-FINAL would use just RELENG-1_0-FINAL for <name>, and fast-import will write the corresponding ref as refs/tags/RELENG-1_0-FINAL.

The value of <name> must be a valid refname in Git and therefore may contain forward slashes. As LF is not valid in a Git refname, no quoting or escaping syntax is supported here.

The from command is the same as in the commit command; see above for details.

The tagger command uses the same format as committer within commit; again see above for details.

The data command following tagger must supply the annotated tag message (see below for data command syntax). To import an empty tag message use a 0 length data. Tag messages are free-form and are not interpreted by Git. Currently they must be encoded in UTF-8, as fast-import does not permit other encodings to be specified.

Signing annotated tags during import from within fast-import is not supported. Trying to include your own PGP/GPG signature is not recommended, as the frontend does not (easily) have access to the complete set of bytes which normally goes into such a signature. If signing is required, create lightweight tags from within fast-import with reset, then create the annotated versions of those tags offline with the standard git tag process.

reset

Creates (or recreates) the named branch, optionally starting from a specific revision. The reset command allows a frontend to issue a new from command for an existing branch, or to create a new branch from an existing commit without creating a new commit.

        'reset' SP <ref> LF
        ('from' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
        LF?

For a detailed description of <ref> and <commit-ish> see above under commit and from.

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required).

The reset command can also be used to create lightweight (non-annotated) tags. For example:

reset refs/tags/938
from :938

would create the lightweight tag refs/tags/938 referring to whatever commit mark :938 references.

blob

Requests writing one file revision to the packfile. The revision is not connected to any commit; this connection must be formed in a subsequent commit command by referencing the blob through an assigned mark.

        'blob' LF
        mark?
        original-oid?
        data

The mark command is optional here as some frontends have chosen to generate the Git SHA-1 for the blob on their own, and feed that directly to commit. This is typically more work than it's worth however, as marks are inexpensive to store and easy to use.

data

Supplies raw data (for use as blob/file content, commit messages, or annotated tag messages) to fast-import. Data can be supplied using an exact byte count or delimited with a terminating line. Real frontends intended for production-quality conversions should always use the exact byte count format, as it is more robust and performs better. The delimited format is intended primarily for testing fast-import.

Comment lines appearing within the <raw> part of data commands are always taken to be part of the body of the data and are therefore never ignored by fast-import. This makes it safe to import any file/message content whose lines might start with #.

Exact byte count format

The frontend must specify the number of bytes of data.

        'data' SP <count> LF
        <raw> LF?

where <count> is the exact number of bytes appearing within <raw>. The value of <count> is expressed as an ASCII decimal integer. The LF on either side of <raw> is not included in <count> and will not be included in the imported data.

The LF after <raw> is optional (it used to be required) but recommended. Always including it makes debugging a fast-import stream easier as the next command always starts in column 0 of the next line, even if <raw> did not end with an LF.

Delimited format

A delimiter string is used to mark the end of the data. fast-import will compute the length by searching for the delimiter. This format is primarily useful for testing and is not recommended for real data.

        'data' SP '<<' <delim> LF
        <raw> LF
        <delim> LF
        LF?

where <delim> is the chosen delimiter string. The string <delim> must not appear on a line by itself within <raw>, as otherwise fast-import will think the data ends earlier than it really does. The LF immediately trailing <raw> is part of <raw>. This is one of the limitations of the delimited format, it is impossible to supply a data chunk which does not have an LF as its last byte.

The LF after <delim> LF is optional (it used to be required).

alias

Record that a mark refers to a given object without first creating any new object.

        'alias' LF
        mark
        'to' SP <commit-ish> LF
        LF?

For a detailed description of <commit-ish> see above under from.

checkpoint

Forces fast-import to close the current packfile, start a new one, and to save out all current branch refs, tags and marks.

        'checkpoint' LF
        LF?

Note that fast-import automatically switches packfiles when the current packfile reaches --max-pack-size, or 4 GiB, whichever limit is smaller. During an automatic packfile switch fast-import does not update the branch refs, tags or marks.

As a checkpoint can require a significant amount of CPU time and disk IO (to compute the overall pack SHA-1 checksum, generate the corresponding index file, and update the refs) it can easily take several minutes for a single checkpoint command to complete.

Frontends may choose to issue checkpoints during extremely large and long running imports, or when they need to allow another Git process access to a branch. However given that a 30 GiB Subversion repository can be loaded into Git through fast-import in about 3 hours, explicit checkpointing may not be necessary.

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required).

progress

Causes fast-import to print the entire progress line unmodified to its standard output channel (file descriptor 1) when the command is processed from the input stream. The command otherwise has no impact on the current import, or on any of fast-import's internal state.

        'progress' SP <any> LF
        LF?

The <any> part of the command may contain any sequence of bytes that does not contain LF. The LF after the command is optional. Callers may wish to process the output through a tool such as sed to remove the leading part of the line, for example:

frontend | git fast-import | sed 's/^progress //'

Placing a progress command immediately after a checkpoint will inform the reader when the checkpoint has been completed and it can safely access the refs that fast-import updated.

get-mark

Causes fast-import to print the SHA-1 corresponding to a mark to stdout or to the file descriptor previously arranged with the --cat-blob-fd argument. The command otherwise has no impact on the current import; its purpose is to retrieve SHA-1s that later commits might want to refer to in their commit messages.

        'get-mark' SP ':' <idnum> LF

See Responses To Commands below for details about how to read this output safely.

cat-blob

Causes fast-import to print a blob to a file descriptor previously arranged with the --cat-blob-fd argument. The command otherwise has no impact on the current import; its main purpose is to retrieve blobs that may be in fast-import's memory but not accessible from the target repository.

        'cat-blob' SP <dataref> LF

The <dataref> can be either a mark reference (:<idnum>) set previously or a full 40-byte SHA-1 of a Git blob, preexisting or ready to be written.

Output uses the same format as git cat-file --batch:

<sha1> SP 'blob' SP <size> LF
<contents> LF

This command can be used where a filemodify directive can appear, allowing it to be used in the middle of a commit. For a filemodify using an inline directive, it can also appear right before the data directive.

See Responses To Commands below for details about how to read this output safely.

ls

Prints information about the object at a path to a file descriptor previously arranged with the --cat-blob-fd argument. This allows printing a blob from the active commit (with cat-blob) or copying a blob or tree from a previous commit for use in the current one (with filemodify).

The ls command can also be used where a filemodify directive can appear, allowing it to be used in the middle of a commit.

Reading from the active commit

This form can only be used in the middle of a commit. The path names a directory entry within fast-import's active commit. The path must be quoted in this case.

        'ls' SP <path> LF
Reading from a named tree

The <dataref> can be a mark reference (:<idnum>) or the full 40-byte SHA-1 of a Git tag, commit, or tree object, preexisting or waiting to be written. The path is relative to the top level of the tree named by <dataref>.

        'ls' SP <dataref> SP <path> LF

See filemodify above for a detailed description of <path>.

Output uses the same format as git ls-tree <tree> -- <path>:

<mode> SP ('blob' | 'tree' | 'commit') SP <dataref> HT <path> LF

The <dataref> represents the blob, tree, or commit object at <path> and can be used in later get-mark, cat-blob, filemodify, or ls commands.

If there is no file or subtree at that path, git fast-import will instead report

missing SP <path> LF

See Responses To Commands below for details about how to read this output safely.

feature

Require that fast-import supports the specified feature, or abort if it does not.

        'feature' SP <feature> ('=' <argument>)? LF

The <feature> part of the command may be any one of the following:

date-format , export-marks , relative-marks , no-relative-marks , force
Act as though the corresponding command-line option with a leading -- was passed on the command line (see OPTIONS, above).
import-marks , import-marks-if-exists
Like --import-marks except in two respects: first, only one "feature import-marks" or "feature import-marks-if-exists" command is allowed per stream; second, an --import-marks= or --import-marks-if-exists command-line option overrides any of these "feature" commands in the stream; third, "feature import-marks-if-exists" like a corresponding command-line option silently skips a nonexistent file.
get-mark , cat-blob , ls
Require that the backend support the get-mark, cat-blob, or ls command respectively. Versions of fast-import not supporting the specified command will exit with a message indicating so. This lets the import error out early with a clear message, rather than wasting time on the early part of an import before the unsupported command is detected.
notes
Require that the backend support the notemodify (N) subcommand to the commit command. Versions of fast-import not supporting notes will exit with a message indicating so.
done
Error out if the stream ends without a done command. Without this feature, errors causing the frontend to end abruptly at a convenient point in the stream can go undetected. This may occur, for example, if an import front end dies in mid-operation without emitting SIGTERM or SIGKILL at its subordinate git fast-import instance.

option

Processes the specified option so that git fast-import behaves in a way that suits the frontend's needs. Note that options specified by the frontend are overridden by any options the user may specify to git fast-import itself.

    'option' SP <option> LF

The <option> part of the command may contain any of the options listed in the OPTIONS section that do not change import semantics, without the leading -- and is treated in the same way.

Option commands must be the first commands on the input (not counting feature commands), to give an option command after any non-option command is an error.

The following command-line options change import semantics and may therefore not be passed as option:

  • date-format
  • import-marks
  • export-marks
  • cat-blob-fd
  • force

done

If the done feature is not in use, treated as if EOF was read. This can be used to tell fast-import to finish early.

If the --done command-line option or feature done command is in use, the done command is mandatory and marks the end of the stream.

RESPONSES TO COMMANDS

New objects written by fast-import are not available immediately. Most fast-import commands have no visible effect until the next checkpoint (or completion). The frontend can send commands to fill fast-import's input pipe without worrying about how quickly they will take effect, which improves performance by simplifying scheduling.

For some frontends, though, it is useful to be able to read back data from the current repository as it is being updated (for example when the source material describes objects in terms of patches to be applied to previously imported objects). This can be accomplished by connecting the frontend and fast-import via bidirectional pipes:

mkfifo fast-import-output
frontend <fast-import-output |
git fast-import >fast-import-output

A frontend set up this way can use progress, get-mark, ls, and cat-blob commands to read information from the import in progress.

To avoid deadlock, such frontends must completely consume any pending output from progress, ls, get-mark, and cat-blob before performing writes to fast-import that might block.

CRASH REPORTS

If fast-import is supplied invalid input it will terminate with a non-zero exit status and create a crash report in the top level of the Git repository it was importing into. Crash reports contain a snapshot of the internal fast-import state as well as the most recent commands that lead up to the crash.

All recent commands (including stream comments, file changes and progress commands) are shown in the command history within the crash report, but raw file data and commit messages are excluded from the crash report. This exclusion saves space within the report file and reduces the amount of buffering that fast-import must perform during execution.

After writing a crash report fast-import will close the current packfile and export the marks table. This allows the frontend developer to inspect the repository state and resume the import from the point where it crashed. The modified branches and tags are not updated during a crash, as the import did not complete successfully. Branch and tag information can be found in the crash report and must be applied manually if the update is needed.

An example crash:

$ cat >in <<END_OF_INPUT
# my very first test commit
commit refs/heads/master
committer Shawn O. Pearce <spearce> 19283 -0400
# who is that guy anyway?
data <<EOF
this is my commit
EOF
M 644 inline .gitignore
data <<EOF
.gitignore
EOF
M 777 inline bob
END_OF_INPUT
$ git fast-import <in
fatal: Corrupt mode: M 777 inline bob
fast-import: dumping crash report to .git/fast_import_crash_8434
$ cat .git/fast_import_crash_8434
fast-import crash report:
    fast-import process: 8434
    parent process     : 1391
    at Sat Sep 1 00:58:12 2007
fatal: Corrupt mode: M 777 inline bob
Most Recent Commands Before Crash
---------------------------------
  # my very first test commit
  commit refs/heads/master
  committer Shawn O. Pearce <spearce> 19283 -0400
  # who is that guy anyway?
  data <<EOF
  M 644 inline .gitignore
  data <<EOF
* M 777 inline bob
Active Branch LRU
-----------------
    active_branches = 1 cur, 5 max
pos  clock name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 1)      0 refs/heads/master
Inactive Branches
-----------------
refs/heads/master:
  status      : active loaded dirty
  tip commit  : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  old tree    : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  cur tree    : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  commit clock: 0
  last pack   :
-------------------
END OF CRASH REPORT

TIPS AND TRICKS

The following tips and tricks have been collected from various users of fast-import, and are offered here as suggestions.

Use One Mark Per Commit

When doing a repository conversion, use a unique mark per commit (mark :<n>) and supply the --export-marks option on the command line. fast-import will dump a file which lists every mark and the Git object SHA-1 that corresponds to it. If the frontend can tie the marks back to the source repository, it is easy to verify the accuracy and completeness of the import by comparing each Git commit to the corresponding source revision.

Coming from a system such as Perforce or Subversion, this should be quite simple, as the fast-import mark can also be the Perforce changeset number or the Subversion revision number.

Freely Skip Around Branches

Don't bother trying to optimize the frontend to stick to one branch at a time during an import. Although doing so might be slightly faster for fast-import, it tends to increase the complexity of the frontend code considerably.

The branch LRU builtin to fast-import tends to behave very well, and the cost of activating an inactive branch is so low that bouncing around between branches has virtually no impact on import performance.

Handling Renames

When importing a renamed file or directory, simply delete the old name(s) and modify the new name(s) during the corresponding commit. Git performs rename detection after-the-fact, rather than explicitly during a commit.

Use Tag Fixup Branches

Some other SCM systems let the user create a tag from multiple files which are not from the same commit/changeset. Or to create tags which are a subset of the files available in the repository.

Importing these tags as-is in Git is impossible without making at least one commit which fixes up the files to match the content of the tag. Use fast-import's reset command to reset a dummy branch outside of your normal branch space to the base commit for the tag, then commit one or more file fixup commits, and finally tag the dummy branch.

For example since all normal branches are stored under refs/heads/ name the tag fixup branch TAG_FIXUP. This way it is impossible for the fixup branch used by the importer to have namespace conflicts with real branches imported from the source (the name TAG_FIXUP is not refs/heads/TAG_FIXUP).

When committing fixups, consider using merge to connect the commit(s) which are supplying file revisions to the fixup branch. Doing so will allow tools such as git blame to track through the real commit history and properly annotate the source files.

After fast-import terminates the frontend will need to do rm .git/TAG_FIXUP to remove the dummy branch.

Import Now, Repack Later

As soon as fast-import completes the Git repository is completely valid and ready for use. Typically this takes only a very short time, even for considerably large projects (100,000+ commits).

However repacking the repository is necessary to improve data locality and access performance. It can also take hours on extremely large projects (especially if -f and a large --window parameter is used). Since repacking is safe to run alongside readers and writers, run the repack in the background and let it finish when it finishes. There is no reason to wait to explore your new Git project!

If you choose to wait for the repack, don't try to run benchmarks or performance tests until repacking is completed. fast-import outputs suboptimal packfiles that are simply never seen in real use situations.

Repacking Historical Data

If you are repacking very old imported data (e.g. older than the last year), consider expending some extra CPU time and supplying --window=50 (or higher) when you run git repack. This will take longer, but will also produce a smaller packfile. You only need to expend the effort once, and everyone using your project will benefit from the smaller repository.

Include Some Progress Messages

Every once in a while have your frontend emit a progress message to fast-import. The contents of the messages are entirely free-form, so one suggestion would be to output the current month and year each time the current commit date moves into the next month. Your users will feel better knowing how much of the data stream has been processed.

PACKFILE OPTIMIZATION

When packing a blob fast-import always attempts to deltify against the last blob written. Unless specifically arranged for by the frontend, this will probably not be a prior version of the same file, so the generated delta will not be the smallest possible. The resulting packfile will be compressed, but will not be optimal.

Frontends which have efficient access to all revisions of a single file (for example reading an RCS/CVS ,v file) can choose to supply all revisions of that file as a sequence of consecutive blob commands. This allows fast-import to deltify the different file revisions against each other, saving space in the final packfile. Marks can be used to later identify individual file revisions during a sequence of commit commands.

The packfile(s) created by fast-import do not encourage good disk access patterns. This is caused by fast-import writing the data in the order it is received on standard input, while Git typically organizes data within packfiles to make the most recent (current tip) data appear before historical data. Git also clusters commits together, speeding up revision traversal through better cache locality.

For this reason it is strongly recommended that users repack the repository with git repack -a -d after fast-import completes, allowing Git to reorganize the packfiles for faster data access. If blob deltas are suboptimal (see above) then also adding the -f option to force recomputation of all deltas can significantly reduce the final packfile size (30-50% smaller can be quite typical).

Instead of running git repack you can also run git gc --aggressive, which will also optimize other things after an import (e.g. pack loose refs). As noted in the "AGGRESSIVE" section in the section called “git-gc(1)” the --aggressive option will find new deltas with the -f option to the section called “git-repack(1)”. For the reasons elaborated on above using --aggressive after a fast-import is one of the few cases where it's known to be worthwhile.

MEMORY UTILIZATION

There are a number of factors which affect how much memory fast-import requires to perform an import. Like critical sections of core Git, fast-import uses its own memory allocators to amortize any overheads associated with malloc. In practice fast-import tends to amortize any malloc overheads to 0, due to its use of large block allocations.

per object

fast-import maintains an in-memory structure for every object written in this execution. On a 32 bit system the structure is 32 bytes, on a 64 bit system the structure is 40 bytes (due to the larger pointer sizes). Objects in the table are not deallocated until fast-import terminates. Importing 2 million objects on a 32 bit system will require approximately 64 MiB of memory.

The object table is actually a hashtable keyed on the object name (the unique SHA-1). This storage configuration allows fast-import to reuse an existing or already written object and avoid writing duplicates to the output packfile. Duplicate blobs are surprisingly common in an import, typically due to branch merges in the source.

per mark

Marks are stored in a sparse array, using 1 pointer (4 bytes or 8 bytes, depending on pointer size) per mark. Although the array is sparse, frontends are still strongly encouraged to use marks between 1 and n, where n is the total number of marks required for this import.

per branch

Branches are classified as active and inactive. The memory usage of the two classes is significantly different.

Inactive branches are stored in a structure which uses 96 or 120 bytes (32 bit or 64 bit systems, respectively), plus the length of the branch name (typically under 200 bytes), per branch. fast-import will easily handle as many as 10,000 inactive branches in under 2 MiB of memory.

Active branches have the same overhead as inactive branches, but also contain copies of every tree that has been recently modified on that branch. If subtree include has not been modified since the branch became active, its contents will not be loaded into memory, but if subtree src has been modified by a commit since the branch became active, then its contents will be loaded in memory.

As active branches store metadata about the files contained on that branch, their in-memory storage size can grow to a considerable size (see below).

fast-import automatically moves active branches to inactive status based on a simple least-recently-used algorithm. The LRU chain is updated on each commit command. The maximum number of active branches can be increased or decreased on the command line with --active-branches=.

per active tree

Trees (aka directories) use just 12 bytes of memory on top of the memory required for their entries (see per active file below). The cost of a tree is virtually 0, as its overhead amortizes out over the individual file entries.

per active file entry

Files (and pointers to subtrees) within active trees require 52 or 64 bytes (32/64 bit platforms) per entry. To conserve space, file and tree names are pooled in a common string table, allowing the filename Makefile to use just 16 bytes (after including the string header overhead) no matter how many times it occurs within the project.

The active branch LRU, when coupled with the filename string pool and lazy loading of subtrees, allows fast-import to efficiently import projects with 2,000+ branches and 45,114+ files in a very limited memory footprint (less than 2.7 MiB per active branch).

SIGNALS

Sending SIGUSR1 to the git fast-import process ends the current packfile early, simulating a checkpoint command. The impatient operator can use this facility to peek at the objects and refs from an import in progress, at the cost of some added running time and worse compression.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

fastimport.unpackLimit
If the number of objects imported by the section called “git-fast-import(1)” is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However, if the number of imported objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the pack will be stored as a pack. Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fetch-pack(1)

NAME

git-fetch-pack - Receive missing objects from another repository

SYNOPSIS

git fetch-pack [--all] [--quiet|-q] [--keep|-k] [--thin] [--include-tag]
        [--upload-pack=<git-upload-pack>]
        [--depth=<n>] [--no-progress]
        [-v] <repository> [<refs>…]

DESCRIPTION

Usually you would want to use git fetch, which is a higher level wrapper of this command, instead.

Invokes git-upload-pack on a possibly remote repository and asks it to send objects missing from this repository, to update the named heads. The list of commits available locally is found out by scanning the local refs/ hierarchy and sent to git-upload-pack running on the other end.

This command degenerates to download everything to complete the asked refs from the remote side when the local side does not have a common ancestor commit.

OPTIONS

--all
Fetch all remote refs.
--stdin

Take the list of refs from stdin, one per line. If there are refs specified on the command line in addition to this option, then the refs from stdin are processed after those on the command line.

If --stateless-rpc is specified together with this option then the list of refs must be in packet format (pkt-line). Each ref must be in a separate packet, and the list must end with a flush packet.

-q , --quiet
Pass -q flag to git unpack-objects; this makes the cloning process less verbose.
-k , --keep
Do not invoke git unpack-objects on received data, but create a single packfile out of it instead, and store it in the object database. If provided twice then the pack is locked against repacking.
--thin
Fetch a "thin" pack, which records objects in deltified form based on objects not included in the pack to reduce network traffic.
--include-tag
If the remote side supports it, annotated tags objects will be downloaded on the same connection as the other objects if the object the tag references is downloaded. The caller must otherwise determine the tags this option made available.
--upload-pack=<git-upload-pack>
Use this to specify the path to git-upload-pack on the remote side, if it is not found on your $PATH. Installations of sshd ignores the user's environment setup scripts for login shells (e.g. .bash_profile) and your privately installed git may not be found on the system default $PATH. Another workaround suggested is to set up your $PATH in ".bashrc", but this flag is for people who do not want to pay the overhead for non-interactive shells by having a lean .bashrc file (they set most of the things up in .bash_profile).
--exec=<git-upload-pack>
Same as --upload-pack=<git-upload-pack>.
--depth=<n>
Limit fetching to ancestor-chains not longer than n. git-upload-pack treats the special depth 2147483647 as infinite even if there is an ancestor-chain that long.
--shallow-since=<date>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to include all reachable commits after <date>.
--shallow-exclude=<ref>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to exclude commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This option can be specified multiple times.
--deepen-relative
Argument --depth specifies the number of commits from the current shallow boundary instead of from the tip of each remote branch history.
--refetch
Skips negotiating commits with the server in order to fetch all matching objects. Use to reapply a new partial clone blob/tree filter.
--no-progress
Do not show the progress.
--check-self-contained-and-connected
Output "connectivity-ok" if the received pack is self-contained and connected.
-v
Run verbosely.
<repository>
The URL to the remote repository.
<refs>…

The remote heads to update from. This is relative to $GIT_DIR (e.g. "HEAD", "refs/heads/master"). When unspecified, update from all heads the remote side has.

If the remote has enabled the options uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant, uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant, or uploadpack.allowAnySHA1InWant, they may alternatively be 40-hex sha1s present on the remote.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fetch(1)

NAME

git-fetch - Download objects and refs from another repository

SYNOPSIS

git fetch [<options>] [<repository> [<refspec>…]]
git fetch [<options>] <group>
git fetch --multiple [<options>] [(<repository> | <group>)…]
git fetch --all [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

Fetch branches and/or tags (collectively, "refs") from one or more other repositories, along with the objects necessary to complete their histories. Remote-tracking branches are updated (see the description of <refspec> below for ways to control this behavior).

By default, any tag that points into the histories being fetched is also fetched; the effect is to fetch tags that point at branches that you are interested in. This default behavior can be changed by using the --tags or --no-tags options or by configuring remote.<name>.tagOpt. By using a refspec that fetches tags explicitly, you can fetch tags that do not point into branches you are interested in as well.

git fetch can fetch from either a single named repository or URL, or from several repositories at once if <group> is given and there is a remotes.<group> entry in the configuration file. (See the section called “git-config(1)”).

When no remote is specified, by default the origin remote will be used, unless there's an upstream branch configured for the current branch.

The names of refs that are fetched, together with the object names they point at, are written to .git/FETCH_HEAD. This information may be used by scripts or other git commands, such as the section called “git-pull(1)”.

OPTIONS

--[no-]all
Fetch all remotes, except for the ones that has the remote.<name>.skipFetchAll configuration variable set. This overrides the configuration variable fetch.all`.
-a , --append
Append ref names and object names of fetched refs to the existing contents of .git/FETCH_HEAD. Without this option old data in .git/FETCH_HEAD will be overwritten.
--atomic
Use an atomic transaction to update local refs. Either all refs are updated, or on error, no refs are updated.
--depth=<depth>
Limit fetching to the specified number of commits from the tip of each remote branch history. If fetching to a shallow repository created by git clone with --depth=<depth> option (see the section called “git-clone(1)”), deepen or shorten the history to the specified number of commits. Tags for the deepened commits are not fetched.
--deepen=<depth>
Similar to --depth, except it specifies the number of commits from the current shallow boundary instead of from the tip of each remote branch history.
--shallow-since=<date>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to include all reachable commits after <date>.
--shallow-exclude=<ref>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to exclude commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This option can be specified multiple times.
--unshallow

If the source repository is complete, convert a shallow repository to a complete one, removing all the limitations imposed by shallow repositories.

If the source repository is shallow, fetch as much as possible so that the current repository has the same history as the source repository.

--update-shallow
By default when fetching from a shallow repository, git fetch refuses refs that require updating .git/shallow. This option updates .git/shallow and accepts such refs.
--negotiation-tip=<commit|glob>

By default, Git will report, to the server, commits reachable from all local refs to find common commits in an attempt to reduce the size of the to-be-received packfile. If specified, Git will only report commits reachable from the given tips. This is useful to speed up fetches when the user knows which local ref is likely to have commits in common with the upstream ref being fetched.

This option may be specified more than once; if so, Git will report commits reachable from any of the given commits.

The argument to this option may be a glob on ref names, a ref, or the (possibly abbreviated) SHA-1 of a commit. Specifying a glob is equivalent to specifying this option multiple times, one for each matching ref name.

See also the fetch.negotiationAlgorithm and push.negotiate configuration variables documented in the section called “git-config(1)”, and the --negotiate-only option below.

--negotiate-only

Do not fetch anything from the server, and instead print the ancestors of the provided --negotiation-tip=* arguments, which we have in common with the server.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand]. Internally this is used to implement the push.negotiate option, see the section called “git-config(1)”.

--dry-run
Show what would be done, without making any changes.
--porcelain

Print the output to standard output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. See section OUTPUT in the section called “git-fetch(1)” for details.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand] and takes precedence over the fetch.output config option.

--[no-]write-fetch-head
Write the list of remote refs fetched in the FETCH_HEAD file directly under $GIT_DIR. This is the default. Passing --no-write-fetch-head from the command line tells Git not to write the file. Under --dry-run option, the file is never written.
-f , --force
When git fetch is used with <src>:<dst> refspec, it may refuse to update the local branch as discussed in the <refspec> part below. This option overrides that check.
-k , --keep
Keep downloaded pack.
--multiple
Allow several <repository> and <group> arguments to be specified. No <refspec>s may be specified.
--[no-]auto-maintenance , --[no-]auto-gc
Run git maintenance run --auto at the end to perform automatic repository maintenance if needed. (--[no-]auto-gc is a synonym.) This is enabled by default.
--[no-]write-commit-graph
Write a commit-graph after fetching. This overrides the config setting fetch.writeCommitGraph.
--prefetch
Modify the configured refspec to place all refs into the refs/prefetch/ namespace. See the prefetch task in the section called “git-maintenance(1)”.
-p , --prune

Before fetching, remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote. Tags are not subject to pruning if they are fetched only because of the default tag auto-following or due to a --tags option. However, if tags are fetched due to an explicit refspec (either on the command line or in the remote configuration, for example if the remote was cloned with the --mirror option), then they are also subject to pruning. Supplying --prune-tags is a shorthand for providing the tag refspec.

See the PRUNING section below for more details.

-P , --prune-tags

Before fetching, remove any local tags that no longer exist on the remote if --prune is enabled. This option should be used more carefully, unlike --prune it will remove any local references (local tags) that have been created. This option is a shorthand for providing the explicit tag refspec along with --prune, see the discussion about that in its documentation.

See the PRUNING section below for more details.

-n , --no-tags
By default, tags that point at objects that are downloaded from the remote repository are fetched and stored locally. This option disables this automatic tag following. The default behavior for a remote may be specified with the remote.<name>.tagOpt setting. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--refetch
Instead of negotiating with the server to avoid transferring commits and associated objects that are already present locally, this option fetches all objects as a fresh clone would. Use this to reapply a partial clone filter from configuration or using --filter= when the filter definition has changed. Automatic post-fetch maintenance will perform object database pack consolidation to remove any duplicate objects.
--refmap=<refspec>
When fetching refs listed on the command line, use the specified refspec (can be given more than once) to map the refs to remote-tracking branches, instead of the values of remote.*.fetch configuration variables for the remote repository. Providing an empty <refspec> to the --refmap option causes Git to ignore the configured refspecs and rely entirely on the refspecs supplied as command-line arguments. See section on "Configured Remote-tracking Branches" for details.
-t , --tags
Fetch all tags from the remote (i.e., fetch remote tags refs/tags/* into local tags with the same name), in addition to whatever else would otherwise be fetched. Using this option alone does not subject tags to pruning, even if --prune is used (though tags may be pruned anyway if they are also the destination of an explicit refspec; see --prune).
--recurse-submodules[=(yes|on-demand|no)]

This option controls if and under what conditions new commits of submodules should be fetched too. When recursing through submodules, git fetch always attempts to fetch "changed" submodules, that is, a submodule that has commits that are referenced by a newly fetched superproject commit but are missing in the local submodule clone. A changed submodule can be fetched as long as it is present locally e.g. in $GIT_DIR/modules/ (see the section called “gitsubmodules(7)”); if the upstream adds a new submodule, that submodule cannot be fetched until it is cloned e.g. by git submodule update.

When set to on-demand, only changed submodules are fetched. When set to yes, all populated submodules are fetched and submodules that are both unpopulated and changed are fetched. When set to no, submodules are never fetched.

When unspecified, this uses the value of fetch.recurseSubmodules if it is set (see the section called “git-config(1)”), defaulting to on-demand if unset. When this option is used without any value, it defaults to yes.

-j , --jobs=<n>

Number of parallel children to be used for all forms of fetching.

If the --multiple option was specified, the different remotes will be fetched in parallel. If multiple submodules are fetched, they will be fetched in parallel. To control them independently, use the config settings fetch.parallel and submodule.fetchJobs (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

Typically, parallel recursive and multi-remote fetches will be faster. By default fetches are performed sequentially, not in parallel.

--no-recurse-submodules
Disable recursive fetching of submodules (this has the same effect as using the --recurse-submodules=no option).
--set-upstream
If the remote is fetched successfully, add upstream (tracking) reference, used by argument-less the section called “git-pull(1)” and other commands. For more information, see branch.<name>.merge and branch.<name>.remote in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--submodule-prefix=<path>
Prepend <path> to paths printed in informative messages such as "Fetching submodule foo". This option is used internally when recursing over submodules.
--recurse-submodules-default=[yes|on-demand]
This option is used internally to temporarily provide a non-negative default value for the --recurse-submodules option. All other methods of configuring fetch's submodule recursion (such as settings in the section called “gitmodules(5)” and the section called “git-config(1)”) override this option, as does specifying --[no-]recurse-submodules directly.
-u , --update-head-ok
By default git fetch refuses to update the head which corresponds to the current branch. This flag disables the check. This is purely for the internal use for git pull to communicate with git fetch, and unless you are implementing your own Porcelain you are not supposed to use it.
--upload-pack <upload-pack>
When given, and the repository to fetch from is handled by git fetch-pack, --exec=<upload-pack> is passed to the command to specify non-default path for the command run on the other end.
-q , --quiet
Pass --quiet to git-fetch-pack and silence any other internally used git commands. Progress is not reported to the standard error stream.
-v , --verbose
Be verbose.
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
-o <option> , --server-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server when communicating using protocol version 2. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF character. The server's handling of server options, including unknown ones, is server-specific. When multiple --server-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the other side in the order listed on the command line. When no --server-option=<option> is given from the command line, the values of configuration variable remote.<name>.serverOption are used instead.
--show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch. This can be disabled through fetch.showForcedUpdates, but the --show-forced-updates option guarantees this check occurs. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--no-show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch. Pass --no-show-forced-updates or set fetch.showForcedUpdates to false to skip this check for performance reasons. If used during git-pull the --ff-only option will still check for forced updates before attempting a fast-forward update. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
-4 , --ipv4
Use IPv4 addresses only, ignoring IPv6 addresses.
-6 , --ipv6
Use IPv6 addresses only, ignoring IPv4 addresses.
<repository>
The "remote" repository that is the source of a fetch or pull operation. This parameter can be either a URL (see the section GIT URLS below) or the name of a remote (see the section REMOTES below).
<group>
A name referring to a list of repositories as the value of remotes.<group> in the configuration file. (See the section called “git-config(1)”).
<refspec>

Specifies which refs to fetch and which local refs to update. When no <refspec>s appear on the command line, the refs to fetch are read from remote.<repository>.fetch variables instead (see CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES below).

The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by the destination <dst>. The colon can be omitted when <dst> is empty. <src> is typically a ref, or a glob pattern with a single * that is used to match a set of refs, but it can also be a fully spelled hex object name.

A <refspec> may contain a * in its <src> to indicate a simple pattern match. Such a refspec functions like a glob that matches any ref with the pattern. A pattern <refspec> must have one and only one * in both the <src> and <dst>. It will map refs to the destination by replacing the * with the contents matched from the source.

If a refspec is prefixed by ^, it will be interpreted as a negative refspec. Rather than specifying which refs to fetch or which local refs to update, such a refspec will instead specify refs to exclude. A ref will be considered to match if it matches at least one positive refspec, and does not match any negative refspec. Negative refspecs can be useful to restrict the scope of a pattern refspec so that it will not include specific refs. Negative refspecs can themselves be pattern refspecs. However, they may only contain a <src> and do not specify a <dst>. Fully spelled out hex object names are also not supported.

tag <tag> means the same as refs/tags/<tag>:refs/tags/<tag>; it requests fetching everything up to the given tag.

The remote ref that matches <src> is fetched, and if <dst> is not an empty string, an attempt is made to update the local ref that matches it.

Whether that update is allowed without --force depends on the ref namespace it's being fetched to, the type of object being fetched, and whether the update is considered to be a fast-forward. Generally, the same rules apply for fetching as when pushing, see the <refspec>... section of the section called “git-push(1)” for what those are. Exceptions to those rules particular to git fetch are noted below.

Until Git version 2.20, and unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, any updates to refs/tags/* would be accepted without + in the refspec (or --force). When fetching, we promiscuously considered all tag updates from a remote to be forced fetches. Since Git version 2.20, fetching to update refs/tags/* works the same way as when pushing. I.e. any updates will be rejected without + in the refspec (or --force).

Unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, any updates outside of refs/{tags,heads}/* will be accepted without + in the refspec (or --force), whether that's swapping e.g. a tree object for a blob, or a commit for another commit that doesn't have the previous commit as an ancestor etc.

Unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, there is no configuration which'll amend these rules, and nothing like a pre-fetch hook analogous to the pre-receive hook.

As with pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, all of the rules described above about what's not allowed as an update can be overridden by adding an optional leading + to a refspec (or using the --force command line option). The only exception to this is that no amount of forcing will make the refs/heads/* namespace accept a non-commit object.

Note

When the remote branch you want to fetch is known to be rewound and rebased regularly, it is expected that its new tip will not be a descendant of its previous tip (as stored in your remote-tracking branch the last time you fetched). You would want to use the + sign to indicate non-fast-forward updates will be needed for such branches. There is no way to determine or declare that a branch will be made available in a repository with this behavior; the pulling user simply must know this is the expected usage pattern for a branch.

--stdin
Read refspecs, one per line, from stdin in addition to those provided as arguments. The "tag <name>" format is not supported.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository. Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and deprecated; do not use them).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • http[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • ftp[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:

  • [<user>@]<host>:/<path-to-git-repo>

This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a colon. For example the local path foo:bar could be specified as an absolute path or ./foo:bar to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh url.

The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~<username> expansion:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • [<user>@]<host>:~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following syntaxes may be used:

  • /path/to/repo.git/
  • file:///path/to/repo.git/

These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except when cloning, when the former implies --local option. See the section called “git-clone(1)” for details.

git clone, git fetch and git pull, but not git push, will also accept a suitable bundle file. See the section called “git-bundle(1)”.

When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it attempts to use the remote-<transport> remote helper, if one exists. To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax may be used:

  • <transport>::<address>

where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being invoked. See the section called “gitremote-helpers(7)” for details.

If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories and you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs you use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                insteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "git://git.host.xz/"]
                insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
                insteadOf = work:

a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be "git://git.host.xz/repo.git".

If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                pushInsteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "ssh://example.org/"]
                pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/

a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to "ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still use the original URL.

REMOTES

The name of one of the following can be used instead of a URL as <repository> argument:

  • a remote in the Git configuration file: $GIT_DIR/config,
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/remotes directory, or
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/branches directory.

All of these also allow you to omit the refspec from the command line because they each contain a refspec which git will use by default.

Named remote in configuration file

You can choose to provide the name of a remote which you had previously configured using the section called “git-remote(1)”, the section called “git-config(1)” or even by a manual edit to the $GIT_DIR/config file. The URL of this remote will be used to access the repository. The refspec of this remote will be used by default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. The entry in the config file would appear like this:

        [remote "<name>"]
                url = <URL>
                pushurl = <pushurl>
                push = <refspec>
                fetch = <refspec>

The <pushurl> is used for pushes only. It is optional and defaults to <URL>. Pushing to a remote affects all defined pushurls or all defined urls if no pushurls are defined. Fetch, however, will only fetch from the first defined url if multiple urls are defined.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/remotes

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/remotes. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. The refspec in this file will be used as default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. This file should have the following format:

        URL: one of the above URL formats
        Push: <refspec>
        Pull: <refspec>

Push: lines are used by git push and Pull: lines are used by git pull and git fetch. Multiple Push: and Pull: lines may be specified for additional branch mappings.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/branches

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/branches. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. This file should have the following format:

        <URL>#<head>

<URL> is required; #<head> is optional.

Depending on the operation, git will use one of the following refspecs, if you don't provide one on the command line. <branch> is the name of this file in $GIT_DIR/branches and <head> defaults to master.

git fetch uses:

        refs/heads/<head>:refs/heads/<branch>

git push uses:

        HEAD:refs/heads/<head>

CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES

You often interact with the same remote repository by regularly and repeatedly fetching from it. In order to keep track of the progress of such a remote repository, git fetch allows you to configure remote.<repository>.fetch configuration variables.

Typically such a variable may look like this:

[remote "origin"]
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

This configuration is used in two ways:

  • When git fetch is run without specifying what branches and/or tags to fetch on the command line, e.g. git fetch origin or git fetch, remote.<repository>.fetch values are used as the refspecs--they specify which refs to fetch and which local refs to update. The example above will fetch all branches that exist in the origin (i.e. any ref that matches the left-hand side of the value, refs/heads/*) and update the corresponding remote-tracking branches in the refs/remotes/origin/* hierarchy.
  • When git fetch is run with explicit branches and/or tags to fetch on the command line, e.g. git fetch origin master, the <refspec>s given on the command line determine what are to be fetched (e.g. master in the example, which is a short-hand for master:, which in turn means "fetch the master branch but I do not explicitly say what remote-tracking branch to update with it from the command line"), and the example command will fetch only the master branch. The remote.<repository>.fetch values determine which remote-tracking branch, if any, is updated. When used in this way, the remote.<repository>.fetch values do not have any effect in deciding what gets fetched (i.e. the values are not used as refspecs when the command-line lists refspecs); they are only used to decide where the refs that are fetched are stored by acting as a mapping.

The latter use of the remote.<repository>.fetch values can be overridden by giving the --refmap=<refspec> parameter(s) on the command line.

PRUNING

Git has a default disposition of keeping data unless it's explicitly thrown away; this extends to holding onto local references to branches on remotes that have themselves deleted those branches.

If left to accumulate, these stale references might make performance worse on big and busy repos that have a lot of branch churn, and e.g. make the output of commands like git branch -a --contains <commit> needlessly verbose, as well as impacting anything else that'll work with the complete set of known references.

These remote-tracking references can be deleted as a one-off with either of:

# While fetching
$ git fetch --prune <name>

# Only prune, don't fetch
$ git remote prune <name>

To prune references as part of your normal workflow without needing to remember to run that, set fetch.prune globally, or remote.<name>.prune per-remote in the config. See the section called “git-config(1)”.

Here's where things get tricky and more specific. The pruning feature doesn't actually care about branches, instead it'll prune local ←→ remote-references as a function of the refspec of the remote (see <refspec> and CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES above).

Therefore if the refspec for the remote includes e.g. refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*, or you manually run e.g. git fetch --prune <name> "refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*" it won't be stale remote tracking branches that are deleted, but any local tag that doesn't exist on the remote.

This might not be what you expect, i.e. you want to prune remote <name>, but also explicitly fetch tags from it, so when you fetch from it you delete all your local tags, most of which may not have come from the <name> remote in the first place.

So be careful when using this with a refspec like refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*, or any other refspec which might map references from multiple remotes to the same local namespace.

Since keeping up-to-date with both branches and tags on the remote is a common use-case the --prune-tags option can be supplied along with --prune to prune local tags that don't exist on the remote, and force-update those tags that differ. Tag pruning can also be enabled with fetch.pruneTags or remote.<name>.pruneTags in the config. See the section called “git-config(1)”.

The --prune-tags option is equivalent to having refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* declared in the refspecs of the remote. This can lead to some seemingly strange interactions:

# These both fetch tags
$ git fetch --no-tags origin 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
$ git fetch --no-tags --prune-tags origin

The reason it doesn't error out when provided without --prune or its config versions is for flexibility of the configured versions, and to maintain a 1=1 mapping between what the command line flags do, and what the configuration versions do.

It's reasonable to e.g. configure fetch.pruneTags=true in ~/.gitconfig to have tags pruned whenever git fetch --prune is run, without making every invocation of git fetch without --prune an error.

Pruning tags with --prune-tags also works when fetching a URL instead of a named remote. These will all prune tags not found on origin:

$ git fetch origin --prune --prune-tags
$ git fetch origin --prune 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
$ git fetch <url-of-origin> --prune --prune-tags
$ git fetch <url-of-origin> --prune 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'

OUTPUT

The output of "git fetch" depends on the transport method used; this section describes the output when fetching over the Git protocol (either locally or via ssh) and Smart HTTP protocol.

The status of the fetch is output in tabular form, with each line representing the status of a single ref. Each line is of the form:

 <flag> <summary> <from> -> <to> [<reason>]

When using --porcelain, the output format is intended to be machine-parseable. In contrast to the human-readable output formats it thus prints to standard output instead of standard error. Each line is of the form:

<flag> <old-object-id> <new-object-id> <local-reference>

The status of up-to-date refs is shown only if the --verbose option is used.

In compact output mode, specified with configuration variable fetch.output, if either entire <from> or <to> is found in the other string, it will be substituted with * in the other string. For example, master -> origin/master becomes master -> origin/*.

flag

A single character indicating the status of the ref:

(space)
for a successfully fetched fast-forward;
+
for a successful forced update;
-
for a successfully pruned ref;
t
for a successful tag update;
*
for a successfully fetched new ref;
!
for a ref that was rejected or failed to update; and
=
for a ref that was up to date and did not need fetching.
summary
For a successfully fetched ref, the summary shows the old and new values of the ref in a form suitable for using as an argument to git log (this is <old>..<new> in most cases, and <old>...<new> for forced non-fast-forward updates).
from
The name of the remote ref being fetched from, minus its refs/<type>/ prefix. In the case of deletion, the name of the remote ref is "(none)".
to
The name of the local ref being updated, minus its refs/<type>/ prefix.
reason
A human-readable explanation. In the case of successfully fetched refs, no explanation is needed. For a failed ref, the reason for failure is described.

EXAMPLES

  • Update the remote-tracking branches:

    $ git fetch origin

    The above command copies all branches from the remote refs/heads/ namespace and stores them to the local refs/remotes/origin/ namespace, unless the remote.<repository>.fetch option is used to specify a non-default refspec.

  • Using refspecs explicitly:

    $ git fetch origin +seen:seen maint:tmp

    This updates (or creates, as necessary) branches seen and tmp in the local repository by fetching from the branches (respectively) seen and maint from the remote repository.

    The seen branch will be updated even if it does not fast-forward, because it is prefixed with a plus sign; tmp will not be.

  • Peek at a remote's branch, without configuring the remote in your local repository:

    $ git fetch git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git maint
    $ git log FETCH_HEAD

    The first command fetches the maint branch from the repository at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git and the second command uses FETCH_HEAD to examine the branch with the section called “git-log(1)”. The fetched objects will eventually be removed by git's built-in housekeeping (see the section called “git-gc(1)”).

SECURITY

The fetch and push protocols are not designed to prevent one side from stealing data from the other repository that was not intended to be shared. If you have private data that you need to protect from a malicious peer, your best option is to store it in another repository. This applies to both clients and servers. In particular, namespaces on a server are not effective for read access control; you should only grant read access to a namespace to clients that you would trust with read access to the entire repository.

The known attack vectors are as follows:

  1. The victim sends "have" lines advertising the IDs of objects it has that are not explicitly intended to be shared but can be used to optimize the transfer if the peer also has them. The attacker chooses an object ID X to steal and sends a ref to X, but isn't required to send the content of X because the victim already has it. Now the victim believes that the attacker has X, and it sends the content of X back to the attacker later. (This attack is most straightforward for a client to perform on a server, by creating a ref to X in the namespace the client has access to and then fetching it. The most likely way for a server to perform it on a client is to "merge" X into a public branch and hope that the user does additional work on this branch and pushes it back to the server without noticing the merge.)
  2. As in #1, the attacker chooses an object ID X to steal. The victim sends an object Y that the attacker already has, and the attacker falsely claims to have X and not Y, so the victim sends Y as a delta against X. The delta reveals regions of X that are similar to Y to the attacker.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

fetch.recurseSubmodules
This option controls whether git fetch (and the underlying fetch in git pull) will recursively fetch into populated submodules. This option can be set either to a boolean value or to on-demand. Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to recurse unconditionally into submodules when set to true or to not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand, fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule's reference. Defaults to on-demand, or to the value of submodule.recurse if set.
fetch.fsckObjects
If it is set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what's checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.
fetch.fsck.<msg-id>
Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.
fetch.fsck.skipList
Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)” instead of the section called “git-fsck(1)”. See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.
fetch.unpackLimit
If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.
fetch.prune
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
fetch.pruneTags
If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* refspec was provided when pruning, if not set already. This allows for setting both this option and fetch.prune to maintain a 1=1 mapping to upstream refs. See also remote.<name>.pruneTags and the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)”.
fetch.all
If true, fetch will attempt to update all available remotes. This behavior can be overridden by passing --no-all or by explicitly specifying one or more remote(s) to fetch from. Defaults to false.
fetch.output
Control how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full and compact. Default value is full. See the OUTPUT section in the section called “git-fetch(1)” for details.
fetch.negotiationAlgorithm

Control how information about the commits in the local repository is sent when negotiating the contents of the packfile to be sent by the server. Set to "consecutive" to use an algorithm that walks over consecutive commits checking each one. Set to "skipping" to use an algorithm that skips commits in an effort to converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary packfile; or set to "noop" to not send any information at all, which will almost certainly result in a larger-than-necessary packfile, but will skip the negotiation step. Set to "default" to override settings made previously and use the default behaviour. The default is normally "consecutive", but if feature.experimental is true, then the default is "skipping". Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out.

See also the --negotiate-only and --negotiation-tip options to the section called “git-fetch(1)”.

fetch.showForcedUpdates
Set to false to enable --no-show-forced-updates in the section called “git-fetch(1)” and the section called “git-pull(1)” commands. Defaults to true.
fetch.parallel

Specifies the maximal number of fetch operations to be run in parallel at a time (submodules, or remotes when the --multiple option of the section called “git-fetch(1)” is in effect).

A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.

For submodules, this setting can be overridden using the submodule.fetchJobs config setting.

fetch.writeCommitGraph
Set to true to write a commit-graph after every git fetch command that downloads a pack-file from a remote. Using the --split option, most executions will create a very small commit-graph file on top of the existing commit-graph file(s). Occasionally, these files will merge and the write may take longer. Having an updated commit-graph file helps performance of many Git commands, including git merge-base, git push -f, and git log --graph. Defaults to false.
fetch.bundleURI

This value stores a URI for downloading Git object data from a bundle URI before performing an incremental fetch from the origin Git server. This is similar to how the --bundle-uri option behaves in the section called “git-clone(1)”. git clone --bundle-uri will set the fetch.bundleURI value if the supplied bundle URI contains a bundle list that is organized for incremental fetches.

If you modify this value and your repository has a fetch.bundleCreationToken value, then remove that fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching from the new bundle URI.

fetch.bundleCreationToken

When using fetch.bundleURI to fetch incrementally from a bundle list that uses the "creationToken" heuristic, this config value stores the maximum creationToken value of the downloaded bundles. This value is used to prevent downloading bundles in the future if the advertised creationToken is not strictly larger than this value.

The creation token values are chosen by the provider serving the specific bundle URI. If you modify the URI at fetch.bundleURI, then be sure to remove the value for the fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching.

BUGS

Using --recurse-submodules can only fetch new commits in submodules that are present locally e.g. in $GIT_DIR/modules/. If the upstream adds a new submodule, that submodule cannot be fetched until it is cloned e.g. by git submodule update. This is expected to be fixed in a future Git version.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-filter-branch(1)

NAME

git-filter-branch - Rewrite branches

SYNOPSIS

git filter-branch [--setup <command>] [--subdirectory-filter <directory>]
        [--env-filter <command>] [--tree-filter <command>]
        [--index-filter <command>] [--parent-filter <command>]
        [--msg-filter <command>] [--commit-filter <command>]
        [--tag-name-filter <command>] [--prune-empty]
        [--original <namespace>] [-d <directory>] [-f | --force]
        [--state-branch <branch>] [--] [<rev-list-options>…]

WARNING

git filter-branch has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance). These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and as such, its use is not recommended. Please use an alternative history filtering tool such as git filter-repo. If you still need to use git filter-branch, please carefully read the section called “SAFETY” (and the section called “PERFORMANCE”) to learn about the land mines of filter-branch, and then vigilantly avoid as many of the hazards listed there as reasonably possible.

DESCRIPTION

Lets you rewrite Git revision history by rewriting the branches mentioned in the <rev-list-options>, applying custom filters on each revision. Those filters can modify each tree (e.g. removing a file or running a perl rewrite on all files) or information about each commit. Otherwise, all information (including original commit times or merge information) will be preserved.

The command will only rewrite the positive refs mentioned in the command line (e.g. if you pass a..b, only b will be rewritten). If you specify no filters, the commits will be recommitted without any changes, which would normally have no effect. Nevertheless, this may be useful in the future for compensating for some Git bugs or such, therefore such a usage is permitted.

NOTE: This command honors .git/info/grafts file and refs in the refs/replace/ namespace. If you have any grafts or replacement refs defined, running this command will make them permanent.

WARNING! The rewritten history will have different object names for all the objects and will not converge with the original branch. You will not be able to easily push and distribute the rewritten branch on top of the original branch. Please do not use this command if you do not know the full implications, and avoid using it anyway, if a simple single commit would suffice to fix your problem. (See the "RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in the section called “git-rebase(1)” for further information about rewriting published history.)

Always verify that the rewritten version is correct: The original refs, if different from the rewritten ones, will be stored in the namespace refs/original/.

Note that since this operation is very I/O expensive, it might be a good idea to redirect the temporary directory off-disk with the -d option, e.g. on tmpfs. Reportedly the speedup is very noticeable.

Filters

The filters are applied in the order as listed below. The <command> argument is always evaluated in the shell context using the eval command (with the notable exception of the commit filter, for technical reasons). Prior to that, the $GIT_COMMIT environment variable will be set to contain the id of the commit being rewritten. Also, GIT_AUTHOR_NAME, GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME, GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL, and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE are taken from the current commit and exported to the environment, in order to affect the author and committer identities of the replacement commit created by the section called “git-commit-tree(1)” after the filters have run.

If any evaluation of <command> returns a non-zero exit status, the whole operation will be aborted.

A map function is available that takes an "original sha1 id" argument and outputs a "rewritten sha1 id" if the commit has been already rewritten, and "original sha1 id" otherwise; the map function can return several ids on separate lines if your commit filter emitted multiple commits.

OPTIONS

--setup <command>
This is not a real filter executed for each commit but a one time setup just before the loop. Therefore no commit-specific variables are defined yet. Functions or variables defined here can be used or modified in the following filter steps except the commit filter, for technical reasons.
--subdirectory-filter <directory>
Only look at the history which touches the given subdirectory. The result will contain that directory (and only that) as its project root. Implies the section called “Remap to ancestor”.
--env-filter <command>
This filter may be used if you only need to modify the environment in which the commit will be performed. Specifically, you might want to rewrite the author/committer name/email/time environment variables (see the section called “git-commit-tree(1)” for details).
--tree-filter <command>
This is the filter for rewriting the tree and its contents. The argument is evaluated in shell with the working directory set to the root of the checked out tree. The new tree is then used as-is (new files are auto-added, disappeared files are auto-removed - neither .gitignore files nor any other ignore rules HAVE ANY EFFECT!).
--index-filter <command>
This is the filter for rewriting the index. It is similar to the tree filter but does not check out the tree, which makes it much faster. Frequently used with git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch ..., see EXAMPLES below. For hairy cases, see the section called “git-update-index(1)”.
--parent-filter <command>
This is the filter for rewriting the commit's parent list. It will receive the parent string on stdin and shall output the new parent string on stdout. The parent string is in the format described in the section called “git-commit-tree(1)”: empty for the initial commit, "-p parent" for a normal commit and "-p parent1 -p parent2 -p parent3 …" for a merge commit.
--msg-filter <command>
This is the filter for rewriting the commit messages. The argument is evaluated in the shell with the original commit message on standard input; its standard output is used as the new commit message.
--commit-filter <command>

This is the filter for performing the commit. If this filter is specified, it will be called instead of the git commit-tree command, with arguments of the form "<TREE_ID> [(-p <PARENT_COMMIT_ID>)…]" and the log message on stdin. The commit id is expected on stdout.

As a special extension, the commit filter may emit multiple commit ids; in that case, the rewritten children of the original commit will have all of them as parents.

You can use the map convenience function in this filter, and other convenience functions, too. For example, calling skip_commit "$@" will leave out the current commit (but not its changes! If you want that, use git rebase instead).

You can also use the git_commit_non_empty_tree "$@" instead of git commit-tree "$@" if you don't wish to keep commits with a single parent and that makes no change to the tree.

--tag-name-filter <command>

This is the filter for rewriting tag names. When passed, it will be called for every tag ref that points to a rewritten object (or to a tag object which points to a rewritten object). The original tag name is passed via standard input, and the new tag name is expected on standard output.

The original tags are not deleted, but can be overwritten; use "--tag-name-filter cat" to simply update the tags. In this case, be very careful and make sure you have the old tags backed up in case the conversion has run afoul.

Nearly proper rewriting of tag objects is supported. If the tag has a message attached, a new tag object will be created with the same message, author, and timestamp. If the tag has a signature attached, the signature will be stripped. It is by definition impossible to preserve signatures. The reason this is "nearly" proper, is because ideally if the tag did not change (points to the same object, has the same name, etc.) it should retain any signature. That is not the case, signatures will always be removed, buyer beware. There is also no support for changing the author or timestamp (or the tag message for that matter). Tags which point to other tags will be rewritten to point to the underlying commit.

--prune-empty
Some filters will generate empty commits that leave the tree untouched. This option instructs git-filter-branch to remove such commits if they have exactly one or zero non-pruned parents; merge commits will therefore remain intact. This option cannot be used together with --commit-filter, though the same effect can be achieved by using the provided git_commit_non_empty_tree function in a commit filter.
--original <namespace>
Use this option to set the namespace where the original commits will be stored. The default value is refs/original.
-d <directory>
Use this option to set the path to the temporary directory used for rewriting. When applying a tree filter, the command needs to temporarily check out the tree to some directory, which may consume considerable space in case of large projects. By default it does this in the .git-rewrite/ directory but you can override that choice by this parameter.
-f , --force
git filter-branch refuses to start with an existing temporary directory or when there are already refs starting with refs/original/, unless forced.
--state-branch <branch>
This option will cause the mapping from old to new objects to be loaded from named branch upon startup and saved as a new commit to that branch upon exit, enabling incremental of large trees. If <branch> does not exist it will be created.
<rev-list options>…
Arguments for git rev-list. All positive refs included by these options are rewritten. You may also specify options such as --all, but you must use -- to separate them from the git filter-branch options. Implies the section called “Remap to ancestor”.

Remap to ancestor

By using the section called “git-rev-list(1)” arguments, e.g., path limiters, you can limit the set of revisions which get rewritten. However, positive refs on the command line are distinguished: we don't let them be excluded by such limiters. For this purpose, they are instead rewritten to point at the nearest ancestor that was not excluded.

EXIT STATUS

On success, the exit status is 0. If the filter can't find any commits to rewrite, the exit status is 2. On any other error, the exit status may be any other non-zero value.

EXAMPLES

Suppose you want to remove a file (containing confidential information or copyright violation) from all commits:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm filename' HEAD

However, if the file is absent from the tree of some commit, a simple rm filename will fail for that tree and commit. Thus you may instead want to use rm -f filename as the script.

Using --index-filter with git rm yields a significantly faster version. Like with using rm filename, git rm --cached filename will fail if the file is absent from the tree of a commit. If you want to "completely forget" a file, it does not matter when it entered history, so we also add --ignore-unmatch:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch filename' HEAD

Now, you will get the rewritten history saved in HEAD.

To rewrite the repository to look as if foodir/ had been its project root, and discard all other history:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter foodir -- --all

Thus you can, e.g., turn a library subdirectory into a repository of its own. Note the -- that separates filter-branch options from revision options, and the --all to rewrite all branches and tags.

To set a commit (which typically is at the tip of another history) to be the parent of the current initial commit, in order to paste the other history behind the current history:

git filter-branch --parent-filter 'sed "s/^\$/-p <graft-id>/"' HEAD

(if the parent string is empty - which happens when we are dealing with the initial commit - add graftcommit as a parent). Note that this assumes history with a single root (that is, no merge without common ancestors happened). If this is not the case, use:

git filter-branch --parent-filter \
        'test $GIT_COMMIT = <commit-id> && echo "-p <graft-id>" || cat' HEAD

or even simpler:

git replace --graft $commit-id $graft-id
git filter-branch $graft-id..HEAD

To remove commits authored by "Darl McBribe" from the history:

git filter-branch --commit-filter '
        if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "Darl McBribe" ];
        then
                skip_commit "$@";
        else
                git commit-tree "$@";
        fi' HEAD

The function skip_commit is defined as follows:

skip_commit()
{
        shift;
        while [ -n "$1" ];
        do
                shift;
                map "$1";
                shift;
        done;
}

The shift magic first throws away the tree id and then the -p parameters. Note that this handles merges properly! In case Darl committed a merge between P1 and P2, it will be propagated properly and all children of the merge will become merge commits with P1,P2 as their parents instead of the merge commit.

NOTE the changes introduced by the commits, and which are not reverted by subsequent commits, will still be in the rewritten branch. If you want to throw out changes together with the commits, you should use the interactive mode of git rebase.

You can rewrite the commit log messages using --msg-filter. For example, git svn-id strings in a repository created by git svn can be removed this way:

git filter-branch --msg-filter '
        sed -e "/^git-svn-id:/d"
'

If you need to add Acked-by lines to, say, the last 10 commits (none of which is a merge), use this command:

git filter-branch --msg-filter '
        cat &&
        echo "Acked-by: Bugs Bunny <bunny@bugzilla.org>"
' HEAD~10..HEAD

The --env-filter option can be used to modify committer and/or author identity. For example, if you found out that your commits have the wrong identity due to a misconfigured user.email, you can make a correction, before publishing the project, like this:

git filter-branch --env-filter '
        if test "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "root@localhost"
        then
                GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=john@example.com
        fi
        if test "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "root@localhost"
        then
                GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=john@example.com
        fi
' -- --all

To restrict rewriting to only part of the history, specify a revision range in addition to the new branch name. The new branch name will point to the top-most revision that a git rev-list of this range will print.

Consider this history:

     D--E--F--G--H
    /     /
A--B-----C

To rewrite only commits D,E,F,G,H, but leave A, B and C alone, use:

git filter-branch ... C..H

To rewrite commits E,F,G,H, use one of these:

git filter-branch ... C..H --not D
git filter-branch ... D..H --not C

To move the whole tree into a subdirectory, or remove it from there:

git filter-branch --index-filter \
        'git ls-files -s | sed "s-\t\"*-&newsubdir/-" |
                GIT_INDEX_FILE=$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new \
                        git update-index --index-info &&
         mv "$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"' HEAD

CHECKLIST FOR SHRINKING A REPOSITORY

git-filter-branch can be used to get rid of a subset of files, usually with some combination of --index-filter and --subdirectory-filter. People expect the resulting repository to be smaller than the original, but you need a few more steps to actually make it smaller, because Git tries hard not to lose your objects until you tell it to. First make sure that:

  • You really removed all variants of a filename, if a blob was moved over its lifetime. git log --name-only --follow --all -- filename can help you find renames.
  • You really filtered all refs: use --tag-name-filter cat -- --all when calling git-filter-branch.

Then there are two ways to get a smaller repository. A safer way is to clone, that keeps your original intact.

  • Clone it with git clone file:///path/to/repo. The clone will not have the removed objects. See the section called “git-clone(1)”. (Note that cloning with a plain path just hardlinks everything!)

If you really don't want to clone it, for whatever reasons, check the following points instead (in this order). This is a very destructive approach, so make a backup or go back to cloning it. You have been warned.

  • Remove the original refs backed up by git-filter-branch: say git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d.
  • Expire all reflogs with git reflog expire --expire=now --all.
  • Garbage collect all unreferenced objects with git gc --prune=now (or if your git-gc is not new enough to support arguments to --prune, use git repack -ad; git prune instead).

PERFORMANCE

The performance of git-filter-branch is glacially slow; its design makes it impossible for a backward-compatible implementation to ever be fast:

  • In editing files, git-filter-branch by design checks out each and every commit as it existed in the original repo. If your repo has 10^5 files and 10^5 commits, but each commit only modifies five files, then git-filter-branch will make you do 10^10 modifications, despite only having (at most) 5*10^5 unique blobs.
  • If you try and cheat and try to make git-filter-branch only work on files modified in a commit, then two things happen

    • you run into problems with deletions whenever the user is simply trying to rename files (because attempting to delete files that don't exist looks like a no-op; it takes some chicanery to remap deletes across file renames when the renames happen via arbitrary user-provided shell)
    • even if you succeed at the map-deletes-for-renames chicanery, you still technically violate backward compatibility because users are allowed to filter files in ways that depend upon topology of commits instead of filtering solely based on file contents or names (though this has not been observed in the wild).
  • Even if you don't need to edit files but only want to e.g. rename or remove some and thus can avoid checking out each file (i.e. you can use --index-filter), you still are passing shell snippets for your filters. This means that for every commit, you have to have a prepared git repo where those filters can be run. That's a significant setup.
  • Further, several additional files are created or updated per commit by git-filter-branch. Some of these are for supporting the convenience functions provided by git-filter-branch (such as map()), while others are for keeping track of internal state (but could have also been accessed by user filters; one of git-filter-branch's regression tests does so). This essentially amounts to using the filesystem as an IPC mechanism between git-filter-branch and the user-provided filters. Disks tend to be a slow IPC mechanism, and writing these files also effectively represents a forced synchronization point between separate processes that we hit with every commit.
  • The user-provided shell commands will likely involve a pipeline of commands, resulting in the creation of many processes per commit. Creating and running another process takes a widely varying amount of time between operating systems, but on any platform it is very slow relative to invoking a function.
  • git-filter-branch itself is written in shell, which is kind of slow. This is the one performance issue that could be backward-compatibly fixed, but compared to the above problems that are intrinsic to the design of git-filter-branch, the language of the tool itself is a relatively minor issue.

    • Side note: Unfortunately, people tend to fixate on the written-in-shell aspect and periodically ask if git-filter-branch could be rewritten in another language to fix the performance issues. Not only does that ignore the bigger intrinsic problems with the design, it'd help less than you'd expect: if git-filter-branch itself were not shell, then the convenience functions (map(), skip_commit(), etc) and the --setup argument could no longer be executed once at the beginning of the program but would instead need to be prepended to every user filter (and thus re-executed with every commit).

The git filter-repo tool is an alternative to git-filter-branch which does not suffer from these performance problems or the safety problems (mentioned below). For those with existing tooling which relies upon git-filter-branch, git filter-repo also provides filter-lamely, a drop-in git-filter-branch replacement (with a few caveats). While filter-lamely suffers from all the same safety issues as git-filter-branch, it at least ameliorates the performance issues a little.

SAFETY

git-filter-branch is riddled with gotchas resulting in various ways to easily corrupt repos or end up with a mess worse than what you started with:

  • Someone can have a set of "working and tested filters" which they document or provide to a coworker, who then runs them on a different OS where the same commands are not working/tested (some examples in the git-filter-branch manpage are also affected by this). BSD vs. GNU userland differences can really bite. If lucky, error messages are spewed. But just as likely, the commands either don't do the filtering requested, or silently corrupt by making some unwanted change. The unwanted change may only affect a few commits, so it's not necessarily obvious either. (The fact that problems won't necessarily be obvious means they are likely to go unnoticed until the rewritten history is in use for quite a while, at which point it's really hard to justify another flag-day for another rewrite.)
  • Filenames with spaces are often mishandled by shell snippets since they cause problems for shell pipelines. Not everyone is familiar with find -print0, xargs -0, git-ls-files -z, etc. Even people who are familiar with these may assume such flags are not relevant because someone else renamed any such files in their repo back before the person doing the filtering joined the project. And often, even those familiar with handling arguments with spaces may not do so just because they aren't in the mindset of thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong.
  • Non-ascii filenames can be silently removed despite being in a desired directory. Keeping only wanted paths is often done using pipelines like git ls-files | grep -v ^WANTED_DIR/ | xargs git rm. ls-files will only quote filenames if needed, so folks may not notice that one of the files didn't match the regex (at least not until it's much too late). Yes, someone who knows about core.quotePath can avoid this (unless they have other special characters like \t, \n, or "), and people who use ls-files -z with something other than grep can avoid this, but that doesn't mean they will.
  • Similarly, when moving files around, one can find that filenames with non-ascii or special characters end up in a different directory, one that includes a double quote character. (This is technically the same issue as above with quoting, but perhaps an interesting different way that it can and has manifested as a problem.)
  • It's far too easy to accidentally mix up old and new history. It's still possible with any tool, but git-filter-branch almost invites it. If lucky, the only downside is users getting frustrated that they don't know how to shrink their repo and remove the old stuff. If unlucky, they merge old and new history and end up with multiple "copies" of each commit, some of which have unwanted or sensitive files and others which don't. This comes about in multiple different ways:

    • the default to only doing a partial history rewrite (--all is not the default and few examples show it)
    • the fact that there's no automatic post-run cleanup
    • the fact that --tag-name-filter (when used to rename tags) doesn't remove the old tags but just adds new ones with the new name
    • the fact that little educational information is provided to inform users of the ramifications of a rewrite and how to avoid mixing old and new history. For example, this man page discusses how users need to understand that they need to rebase their changes for all their branches on top of new history (or delete and reclone), but that's only one of multiple concerns to consider. See the "DISCUSSION" section of the git filter-repo manual page for more details.
  • Annotated tags can be accidentally converted to lightweight tags, due to either of two issues:

    • Someone can do a history rewrite, realize they messed up, restore from the backups in refs/original/, and then redo their git-filter-branch command. (The backup in refs/original/ is not a real backup; it dereferences tags first.)
    • Running git-filter-branch with either --tags or --all in your <rev-list-options>. In order to retain annotated tags as annotated, you must use --tag-name-filter (and must not have restored from refs/original/ in a previously botched rewrite).
  • Any commit messages that specify an encoding will become corrupted by the rewrite; git-filter-branch ignores the encoding, takes the original bytes, and feeds it to commit-tree without telling it the proper encoding. (This happens whether or not --msg-filter is used.)
  • Commit messages (even if they are all UTF-8) by default become corrupted due to not being updated -- any references to other commit hashes in commit messages will now refer to no-longer-extant commits.
  • There are no facilities for helping users find what unwanted crud they should delete, which means they are much more likely to have incomplete or partial cleanups that sometimes result in confusion and people wasting time trying to understand. (For example, folks tend to just look for big files to delete instead of big directories or extensions, and once they do so, then sometime later folks using the new repository who are going through history will notice a build artifact directory that has some files but not others, or a cache of dependencies (node_modules or similar) which couldn't have ever been functional since it's missing some files.)
  • If --prune-empty isn't specified, then the filtering process can create hoards of confusing empty commits
  • If --prune-empty is specified, then intentionally placed empty commits from before the filtering operation are also pruned instead of just pruning commits that became empty due to filtering rules.
  • If --prune-empty is specified, sometimes empty commits are missed and left around anyway (a somewhat rare bug, but it happens…)
  • A minor issue, but users who have a goal to update all names and emails in a repository may be led to --env-filter which will only update authors and committers, missing taggers.
  • If the user provides a --tag-name-filter that maps multiple tags to the same name, no warning or error is provided; git-filter-branch simply overwrites each tag in some undocumented pre-defined order resulting in only one tag at the end. (A git-filter-branch regression test requires this surprising behavior.)

Also, the poor performance of git-filter-branch often leads to safety issues:

  • Coming up with the correct shell snippet to do the filtering you want is sometimes difficult unless you're just doing a trivial modification such as deleting a couple files. Unfortunately, people often learn if the snippet is right or wrong by trying it out, but the rightness or wrongness can vary depending on special circumstances (spaces in filenames, non-ascii filenames, funny author names or emails, invalid timezones, presence of grafts or replace objects, etc.), meaning they may have to wait a long time, hit an error, then restart. The performance of git-filter-branch is so bad that this cycle is painful, reducing the time available to carefully re-check (to say nothing about what it does to the patience of the person doing the rewrite even if they do technically have more time available). This problem is extra compounded because errors from broken filters may not be shown for a long time and/or get lost in a sea of output. Even worse, broken filters often just result in silent incorrect rewrites.
  • To top it all off, even when users finally find working commands, they naturally want to share them. But they may be unaware that their repo didn't have some special cases that someone else's does. So, when someone else with a different repository runs the same commands, they get hit by the problems above. Or, the user just runs commands that really were vetted for special cases, but they run it on a different OS where it doesn't work, as noted above.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fmt-merge-msg(1)

NAME

git-fmt-merge-msg - Produce a merge commit message

SYNOPSIS

git fmt-merge-msg [-m <message>] [--into-name <branch>] [--log[=<n>] | --no-log]
git fmt-merge-msg [-m <message>] [--log[=<n>] | --no-log] -F <file>

DESCRIPTION

Takes the list of merged objects on stdin and produces a suitable commit message to be used for the merge commit, usually to be passed as the <merge-message> argument of git merge.

This command is intended mostly for internal use by scripts automatically invoking git merge.

OPTIONS

--log[=<n>]
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged. At most <n> commits from each merge parent will be used (20 if <n> is omitted). This overrides the merge.log configuration variable.
--no-log
Do not list one-line descriptions from the actual commits being merged.
--[no-]summary
Synonyms to --log and --no-log; these are deprecated and will be removed in the future.
-m <message> , --message <message>
Use <message> instead of the branch names for the first line of the log message. For use with --log.
--into-name <branch>
Prepare the merge message as if merging to the branch <branch>, instead of the name of the real branch to which the merge is made.
-F <file> , --file <file>
Take the list of merged objects from <file> instead of stdin.

CONFIGURATION

merge.branchdesc
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with the branch description text associated with them. Defaults to false.
merge.log
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with at most the specified number of one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged. Defaults to false, and true is a synonym for 20.
merge.suppressDest

By adding a glob that matches the names of integration branches to this multi-valued configuration variable, the default merge message computed for merges into these integration branches will omit "into <branch-name>" from its title.

An element with an empty value can be used to clear the list of globs accumulated from previous configuration entries. When there is no merge.suppressDest variable defined, the default value of master is used for backward compatibility.

merge.summary
Synonym to merge.log; this is deprecated and will be removed in the future.

EXAMPLES

$ git fetch origin master
$ git fmt-merge-msg --log <$GIT_DIR/FETCH_HEAD

Print a log message describing a merge of the "master" branch from the "origin" remote.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-for-each-ref(1)

NAME

git-for-each-ref - Output information on each ref

SYNOPSIS

git for-each-ref [--count=<count>] [--shell|--perl|--python|--tcl]
                   [(--sort=<key>)…] [--format=<format>]
                   [--include-root-refs] [ --stdin | <pattern>… ]
                   [--points-at=<object>]
                   [--merged[=<object>]] [--no-merged[=<object>]]
                   [--contains[=<object>]] [--no-contains[=<object>]]
                   [--exclude=<pattern> …]

DESCRIPTION

Iterate over all refs that match <pattern> and show them according to the given <format>, after sorting them according to the given set of <key>. If <count> is given, stop after showing that many refs. The interpolated values in <format> can optionally be quoted as string literals in the specified host language allowing their direct evaluation in that language.

OPTIONS

<pattern>…
If one or more patterns are given, only refs are shown that match against at least one pattern, either using fnmatch(3) or literally, in the latter case matching completely or from the beginning up to a slash.
--stdin
If --stdin is supplied, then the list of patterns is read from standard input instead of from the argument list.
--count=<count>
By default the command shows all refs that match <pattern>. This option makes it stop after showing that many refs.
--sort=<key>
A field name to sort on. Prefix - to sort in descending order of the value. When unspecified, refname is used. You may use the --sort=<key> option multiple times, in which case the last key becomes the primary key.
--format=<format>

A string that interpolates %(fieldname) from a ref being shown and the object it points at. In addition, the string literal %% renders as % and %xx - where xx are hex digits - renders as the character with hex code xx. For example, %00 interpolates to \0 (NUL), %09 to \t (TAB), and %0a to \n (LF).

When unspecified, <format> defaults to %(objectname) SPC %(objecttype) TAB %(refname).

--color[=<when>]
Respect any colors specified in the --format option. The <when> field must be one of always, never, or auto (if <when> is absent, behave as if always was given).
--shell , --perl , --python , --tcl
If given, strings that substitute %(fieldname) placeholders are quoted as string literals suitable for the specified host language. This is meant to produce a scriptlet that can directly be `eval`ed.
--points-at=<object>
Only list refs which points at the given object.
--merged[=<object>]
Only list refs whose tips are reachable from the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--no-merged[=<object>]
Only list refs whose tips are not reachable from the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--contains[=<object>]
Only list refs which contain the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--no-contains[=<object>]
Only list refs which don't contain the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--ignore-case
Sorting and filtering refs are case insensitive.
--omit-empty
Do not print a newline after formatted refs where the format expands to the empty string.
--exclude=<pattern>
If one or more patterns are given, only refs which do not match any excluded pattern(s) are shown. Matching is done using the same rules as <pattern> above.
--include-root-refs
List root refs (HEAD and pseudorefs) apart from regular refs.

FIELD NAMES

Various values from structured fields in referenced objects can be used to interpolate into the resulting output, or as sort keys.

For all objects, the following names can be used:

refname

The name of the ref (the part after $GIT_DIR/). For a non-ambiguous short name of the ref append :short. The option core.warnAmbiguousRefs is used to select the strict abbreviation mode. If lstrip=<N> (rstrip=<N>) is appended, strips <N> slash-separated path components from the front (back) of the refname (e.g. %(refname:lstrip=2) turns refs/tags/foo into foo and %(refname:rstrip=2) turns refs/tags/foo into refs). If <N> is a negative number, strip as many path components as necessary from the specified end to leave -<N> path components (e.g. %(refname:lstrip=-2) turns refs/tags/foo into tags/foo and %(refname:rstrip=-1) turns refs/tags/foo into refs). When the ref does not have enough components, the result becomes an empty string if stripping with positive <N>, or it becomes the full refname if stripping with negative <N>. Neither is an error.

strip can be used as a synonym to lstrip.

objecttype
The type of the object (blob, tree, commit, tag).
objectsize
The size of the object (the same as git cat-file -s reports). Append :disk to get the size, in bytes, that the object takes up on disk. See the note about on-disk sizes in the CAVEATS section below.
objectname
The object name (aka SHA-1). For a non-ambiguous abbreviation of the object name append :short. For an abbreviation of the object name with desired length append :short=<length>, where the minimum length is MINIMUM_ABBREV. The length may be exceeded to ensure unique object names.
deltabase
This expands to the object name of the delta base for the given object, if it is stored as a delta. Otherwise it expands to the null object name (all zeroes).
upstream

The name of a local ref which can be considered upstream from the displayed ref. Respects :short, :lstrip and :rstrip in the same way as refname above. Additionally respects :track to show "[ahead N, behind M]" and :trackshort to show the terse version: ">" (ahead), "<" (behind), "<>" (ahead and behind), or "=" (in sync). :track also prints "[gone]" whenever unknown upstream ref is encountered. Append :track,nobracket to show tracking information without brackets (i.e "ahead N, behind M").

For any remote-tracking branch %(upstream), %(upstream:remotename) and %(upstream:remoteref) refer to the name of the remote and the name of the tracked remote ref, respectively. In other words, the remote-tracking branch can be updated explicitly and individually by using the refspec %(upstream:remoteref):%(upstream) to fetch from %(upstream:remotename).

Has no effect if the ref does not have tracking information associated with it. All the options apart from nobracket are mutually exclusive, but if used together the last option is selected.

push
The name of a local ref which represents the @{push} location for the displayed ref. Respects :short, :lstrip, :rstrip, :track, :trackshort, :remotename, and :remoteref options as upstream does. Produces an empty string if no @{push} ref is configured.
HEAD
* if HEAD matches current ref (the checked out branch), ' ' otherwise.
color
Change output color. Followed by :<colorname>, where color names are described under Values in the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-config(1)”. For example, %(color:bold red).
align
Left-, middle-, or right-align the content between %(align:…) and %(end). The "align:" is followed by width=<width> and position=<position> in any order separated by a comma, where the <position> is either left, right or middle, default being left and <width> is the total length of the content with alignment. For brevity, the "width=" and/or "position=" prefixes may be omitted, and bare <width> and <position> used instead. For instance, %(align:<width>,<position>). If the contents length is more than the width then no alignment is performed. If used with --quote everything in between %(align:…) and %(end) is quoted, but if nested then only the topmost level performs quoting.
if
Used as %(if)…%(then)…%(end) or %(if)…%(then)…%(else)…%(end). If there is an atom with value or string literal after the %(if) then everything after the %(then) is printed, else if the %(else) atom is used, then everything after %(else) is printed. We ignore space when evaluating the string before %(then), this is useful when we use the %(HEAD) atom which prints either "*" or " " and we want to apply the if condition only on the HEAD ref. Append ":equals=<string>" or ":notequals=<string>" to compare the value between the %(if:…) and %(then) atoms with the given string.
symref
The ref which the given symbolic ref refers to. If not a symbolic ref, nothing is printed. Respects the :short, :lstrip and :rstrip options in the same way as refname above.
signature
The GPG signature of a commit.
signature:grade
Show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired, "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R" for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key) and "N" for no signature.
signature:signer
The signer of the GPG signature of a commit.
signature:key
The key of the GPG signature of a commit.
signature:fingerprint
The fingerprint of the GPG signature of a commit.
signature:primarykeyfingerprint
The primary key fingerprint of the GPG signature of a commit.
signature:trustlevel
The trust level of the GPG signature of a commit. Possible outputs are ultimate, fully, marginal, never and undefined.
worktreepath
The absolute path to the worktree in which the ref is checked out, if it is checked out in any linked worktree. Empty string otherwise.
ahead-behind:<committish>
Two integers, separated by a space, demonstrating the number of commits ahead and behind, respectively, when comparing the output ref to the <committish> specified in the format.
is-base:<committish>

In at most one row, (<committish>) will appear to indicate the ref that is most likely the ref used as a starting point for the branch that produced <committish>. This choice is made using a heuristic: choose the ref that minimizes the number of commits in the first-parent history of <committish> and not in the first-parent history of the ref.

For example, consider the following figure of first-parent histories of several refs:

*--*--*--*--*--* refs/heads/A
\
 \
  *--*--*--* refs/heads/B
   \     \
    \     \
     *     * refs/heads/C
      \
       \
        *--* refs/heads/D

Here, if A, B, and C are the filtered references, and the format string is %(refname):%(is-base:D), then the output would be

refs/heads/A:
refs/heads/B:(D)
refs/heads/C:

This is because the first-parent history of D has its earliest intersection with the first-parent histories of the filtered refs at a common first-parent ancestor of B and C and ties are broken by the earliest ref in the sorted order.

Note that this token will not appear if the first-parent history of <committish> does not intersect the first-parent histories of the filtered refs.

describe[:options]

A human-readable name, like the section called “git-describe(1)”; empty string for undescribable commits. The describe string may be followed by a colon and one or more comma-separated options.

tags=<bool-value>
Instead of only considering annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as well; see the corresponding option in the section called “git-describe(1)” for details.
abbrev=<number>
Use at least <number> hexadecimal digits; see the corresponding option in the section called “git-describe(1)” for details.
match=<pattern>
Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix; see the corresponding option in the section called “git-describe(1)” for details.
exclude=<pattern>
Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix; see the corresponding option in the section called “git-describe(1)” for details.

In addition to the above, for commit and tag objects, the header field names (tree, parent, object, type, and tag) can be used to specify the value in the header field. Fields tree and parent can also be used with modifier :short and :short=<length> just like objectname.

For commit and tag objects, the special creatordate and creator fields will correspond to the appropriate date or name-email-date tuple from the committer or tagger fields depending on the object type. These are intended for working on a mix of annotated and lightweight tags.

For tag objects, a fieldname prefixed with an asterisk (*) expands to the fieldname value of the peeled object, rather than that of the tag object itself.

Fields that have name-email-date tuple as its value (author, committer, and tagger) can be suffixed with name, email, and date to extract the named component. For email fields (authoremail, committeremail and taggeremail), :trim can be appended to get the email without angle brackets, and :localpart to get the part before the @ symbol out of the trimmed email. In addition to these, the :mailmap option and the corresponding :mailmap,trim and :mailmap,localpart can be used (order does not matter) to get values of the name and email according to the .mailmap file or according to the file set in the mailmap.file or mailmap.blob configuration variable (see the section called “gitmailmap(5)”).

The raw data in an object is raw.

raw:size
The raw data size of the object.

Note that --format=%(raw) can not be used with --python, --shell, --tcl, because such language may not support arbitrary binary data in their string variable type.

The message in a commit or a tag object is contents, from which contents:<part> can be used to extract various parts out of:

contents:size
The size in bytes of the commit or tag message.
contents:subject
The first paragraph of the message, which typically is a single line, is taken as the "subject" of the commit or the tag message. Instead of contents:subject, field subject can also be used to obtain same results. :sanitize can be appended to subject for subject line suitable for filename.
contents:body
The remainder of the commit or the tag message that follows the "subject".
contents:signature
The optional GPG signature of the tag.
contents:lines=N
The first N lines of the message.

Additionally, the trailers as interpreted by the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)” are obtained as trailers[:options] (or by using the historical alias contents:trailers[:options]). For valid [:option] values see trailers section of the section called “git-log(1)”.

For sorting purposes, fields with numeric values sort in numeric order (objectsize, authordate, committerdate, creatordate, taggerdate). All other fields are used to sort in their byte-value order.

There is also an option to sort by versions, this can be done by using the fieldname version:refname or its alias v:refname.

In any case, a field name that refers to a field inapplicable to the object referred by the ref does not cause an error. It returns an empty string instead.

As a special case for the date-type fields, you may specify a format for the date by adding : followed by date format name (see the values the --date option to the section called “git-rev-list(1)” takes). If this formatting is provided in a --sort key, references will be sorted according to the byte-value of the formatted string rather than the numeric value of the underlying timestamp.

Some atoms like %(align) and %(if) always require a matching %(end). We call them "opening atoms" and sometimes denote them as %($open).

When a scripting language specific quoting is in effect, everything between a top-level opening atom and its matching %(end) is evaluated according to the semantics of the opening atom and only its result from the top-level is quoted.

EXAMPLES

An example directly producing formatted text. Show the most recent 3 tagged commits:

#!/bin/sh

git for-each-ref --count=3 --sort='-*authordate' \
--format='From: %(*authorname) %(*authoremail)
Subject: %(*subject)
Date: %(*authordate)
Ref: %(*refname)

%(*body)
' 'refs/tags'

A simple example showing the use of shell eval on the output, demonstrating the use of --shell. List the prefixes of all heads:

#!/bin/sh

git for-each-ref --shell --format="ref=%(refname)" refs/heads | \
while read entry
do
        eval "$entry"
        echo `dirname $ref`
done

A bit more elaborate report on tags, demonstrating that the format may be an entire script:

#!/bin/sh

fmt='
        r=%(refname)
        t=%(*objecttype)
        T=${r#refs/tags/}

        o=%(*objectname)
        n=%(*authorname)
        e=%(*authoremail)
        s=%(*subject)
        d=%(*authordate)
        b=%(*body)

        kind=Tag
        if test "z$t" = z
        then
                # could be a lightweight tag
                t=%(objecttype)
                kind="Lightweight tag"
                o=%(objectname)
                n=%(authorname)
                e=%(authoremail)
                s=%(subject)
                d=%(authordate)
                b=%(body)
        fi
        echo "$kind $T points at a $t object $o"
        if test "z$t" = zcommit
        then
                echo "The commit was authored by $n $e
at $d, and titled

    $s

Its message reads as:
"
                echo "$b" | sed -e "s/^/    /"
                echo
        fi
'

eval=`git for-each-ref --shell --format="$fmt" \
        --sort='*objecttype' \
        --sort=-taggerdate \
        refs/tags`
eval "$eval"

An example to show the usage of %(if)…%(then)…%(else)…%(end). This prefixes the current branch with a star.

git for-each-ref --format="%(if)%(HEAD)%(then)* %(else)  %(end)%(refname:short)" refs/heads/

An example to show the usage of %(if)…%(then)…%(end). This prints the authorname, if present.

git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)%(if)%(authorname)%(then) Authored by: %(authorname)%(end)"

CAVEATS

Note that the sizes of objects on disk are reported accurately, but care should be taken in drawing conclusions about which refs or objects are responsible for disk usage. The size of a packed non-delta object may be much larger than the size of objects which delta against it, but the choice of which object is the base and which is the delta is arbitrary and is subject to change during a repack.

Note also that multiple copies of an object may be present in the object database; in this case, it is undefined which copy's size or delta base will be reported.

NOTES

When combining multiple --contains and --no-contains filters, only references that contain at least one of the --contains commits and contain none of the --no-contains commits are shown.

When combining multiple --merged and --no-merged filters, only references that are reachable from at least one of the --merged commits and from none of the --no-merged commits are shown.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-for-each-repo(1)

NAME

git-for-each-repo - Run a Git command on a list of repositories

SYNOPSIS

git for-each-repo --config=<config> [--] <arguments>

DESCRIPTION

Run a Git command on a list of repositories. The arguments after the known options or -- indicator are used as the arguments for the Git subprocess.

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.

For example, we could run maintenance on each of a list of repositories stored in a maintenance.repo config variable using

git for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run

This will run git -C <repo> maintenance run for each value <repo> in the multi-valued config variable maintenance.repo.

OPTIONS

--config=<config>

Use the given config variable as a multi-valued list storing absolute path names. Iterate on that list of paths to run the given arguments.

These config values are loaded from system, global, and local Git config, as available. If git for-each-repo is run in a directory that is not a Git repository, then only the system and global config is used.

--keep-going

Continue with the remaining repositories if the command failed on a repository. The exit code will still indicate that the overall operation was not successful.

Note that the exact exit code of the failing command is not passed through as the exit code of the for-each-repo command: If the command failed in any of the specified repositories, the overall exit code will be 1.

SUBPROCESS BEHAVIOR

If any git -C <repo> <arguments> subprocess returns a non-zero exit code, then the git for-each-repo process returns that exit code without running more subprocesses.

Each git -C <repo> <arguments> subprocess inherits the standard file descriptors stdin, stdout, and stderr.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-format-patch(1)

NAME

git-format-patch - Prepare patches for e-mail submission

SYNOPSIS

git format-patch [-k] [(-o|--output-directory) <dir> | --stdout]
                   [--no-thread | --thread[=<style>]]
                   [(--attach|--inline)[=<boundary>] | --no-attach]
                   [-s | --signoff]
                   [--signature=<signature> | --no-signature]
                   [--signature-file=<file>]
                   [-n | --numbered | -N | --no-numbered]
                   [--start-number <n>] [--numbered-files]
                   [--in-reply-to=<message-id>] [--suffix=.<sfx>]
                   [--ignore-if-in-upstream] [--always]
                   [--cover-from-description=<mode>]
                   [--rfc[=<rfc>]] [--subject-prefix=<subject-prefix>]
                   [(--reroll-count|-v) <n>]
                   [--to=<email>] [--cc=<email>]
                   [--[no-]cover-letter] [--quiet]
                   [--[no-]encode-email-headers]
                   [--no-notes | --notes[=<ref>]]
                   [--interdiff=<previous>]
                   [--range-diff=<previous> [--creation-factor=<percent>]]
                   [--filename-max-length=<n>]
                   [--progress]
                   [<common-diff-options>]
                   [ <since> | <revision-range> ]

DESCRIPTION

Prepare each non-merge commit with its "patch" in one "message" per commit, formatted to resemble a UNIX mailbox. The output of this command is convenient for e-mail submission or for use with git am.

A "message" generated by the command consists of three parts:

  • A brief metadata header that begins with From <commit> with a fixed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 datestamp to help programs like "file(1)" to recognize that the file is an output from this command, fields that record the author identity, the author date, and the title of the change (taken from the first paragraph of the commit log message).
  • The second and subsequent paragraphs of the commit log message.
  • The "patch", which is the "diff -p --stat" output (see the section called “git-diff(1)”) between the commit and its parent.

The log message and the patch are separated by a line with a three-dash line.

There are two ways to specify which commits to operate on.

  1. A single commit, <since>, specifies that the commits leading to the tip of the current branch that are not in the history that leads to the <since> to be output.
  2. Generic <revision-range> expression (see "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”) means the commits in the specified range.

The first rule takes precedence in the case of a single <commit>. To apply the second rule, i.e., format everything since the beginning of history up until <commit>, use the --root option: git format-patch --root <commit>. If you want to format only <commit> itself, you can do this with git format-patch -1 <commit>.

By default, each output file is numbered sequentially from 1, and uses the first line of the commit message (massaged for pathname safety) as the filename. With the --numbered-files option, the output file names will only be numbers, without the first line of the commit appended. The names of the output files are printed to standard output, unless the --stdout option is specified.

If -o is specified, output files are created in <dir>. Otherwise they are created in the current working directory. The default path can be set with the format.outputDirectory configuration option. The -o option takes precedence over format.outputDirectory. To store patches in the current working directory even when format.outputDirectory points elsewhere, use -o .. All directory components will be created.

By default, the subject of a single patch is "[PATCH] " followed by the concatenation of lines from the commit message up to the first blank line (see the DISCUSSION section of the section called “git-commit(1)”).

When multiple patches are output, the subject prefix will instead be "[PATCH n/m] ". To force 1/1 to be added for a single patch, use -n. To omit patch numbers from the subject, use -N.

If given --thread, git-format-patch will generate In-Reply-To and References headers to make the second and subsequent patch mails appear as replies to the first mail; this also generates a Message-ID header to reference.

OPTIONS

-p , --no-stat
Generate plain patches without any diffstats.
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

-<n>
Prepare patches from the topmost <n> commits.
-o <dir> , --output-directory <dir>
Use <dir> to store the resulting files, instead of the current working directory.
-n , --numbered
Name output in [PATCH n/m] format, even with a single patch.
-N , --no-numbered
Name output in [PATCH] format.
--start-number <n>
Start numbering the patches at <n> instead of 1.
--numbered-files
Output file names will be a simple number sequence without the default first line of the commit appended.
-k , --keep-subject
Do not strip/add [PATCH] from the first line of the commit log message.
-s , --signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer to the commit message, using the committer identity of yourself. See the signoff option in the section called “git-commit(1)” for more information.
--stdout
Print all commits to the standard output in mbox format, instead of creating a file for each one.
--attach[=<boundary>]
Create multipart/mixed attachment, the first part of which is the commit message and the patch itself in the second part, with Content-Disposition: attachment.
--no-attach
Disable the creation of an attachment, overriding the configuration setting.
--inline[=<boundary>]
Create multipart/mixed attachment, the first part of which is the commit message and the patch itself in the second part, with Content-Disposition: inline.
--thread[=<style>] , --no-thread

Controls addition of In-Reply-To and References headers to make the second and subsequent mails appear as replies to the first. Also controls generation of the Message-ID header to reference.

The optional <style> argument can be either shallow or deep. shallow threading makes every mail a reply to the head of the series, where the head is chosen from the cover letter, the --in-reply-to, and the first patch mail, in this order. deep threading makes every mail a reply to the previous one.

The default is --no-thread, unless the format.thread configuration is set. --thread without an argument is equivalent to --thread=shallow.

Beware that the default for git send-email is to thread emails itself. If you want git format-patch to take care of threading, you will want to ensure that threading is disabled for git send-email.

--in-reply-to=<message-id>
Make the first mail (or all the mails with --no-thread) appear as a reply to the given <message-id>, which avoids breaking threads to provide a new patch series.
--ignore-if-in-upstream
Do not include a patch that matches a commit in <until>..<since>. This will examine all patches reachable from <since> but not from <until> and compare them with the patches being generated, and any patch that matches is ignored.
--always
Include patches for commits that do not introduce any change, which are omitted by default.
--cover-from-description=<mode>

Controls which parts of the cover letter will be automatically populated using the branch's description.

If <mode> is message or default, the cover letter subject will be populated with placeholder text. The body of the cover letter will be populated with the branch's description. This is the default mode when no configuration nor command line option is specified.

If <mode> is subject, the first paragraph of the branch description will populate the cover letter subject. The remainder of the description will populate the body of the cover letter.

If <mode> is auto, if the first paragraph of the branch description is greater than 100 bytes, then the mode will be message, otherwise subject will be used.

If <mode> is none, both the cover letter subject and body will be populated with placeholder text.

--description-file=<file>
Use the contents of <file> instead of the branch's description for generating the cover letter.
--subject-prefix=<subject-prefix>

Instead of the standard [PATCH] prefix in the subject line, instead use [<subject-prefix>]. This can be used to name a patch series, and can be combined with the --numbered option.

The configuration variable format.subjectPrefix may also be used to configure a subject prefix to apply to a given repository for all patches. This is often useful on mailing lists which receive patches for several repositories and can be used to disambiguate the patches (with a value of e.g. "PATCH my-project").

--filename-max-length=<n>
Instead of the standard 64 bytes, chomp the generated output filenames at around <n> bytes (too short a value will be silently raised to a reasonable length). Defaults to the value of the format.filenameMaxLength configuration variable, or 64 if unconfigured.
--rfc[=<rfc>]

Prepends the string <rfc> (defaults to "RFC") to the subject prefix. As the subject prefix defaults to "PATCH", you'll get "RFC PATCH" by default.

RFC means "Request For Comments"; use this when sending an experimental patch for discussion rather than application. "--rfc=WIP" may also be a useful way to indicate that a patch is not complete yet ("WIP" stands for "Work In Progress").

If the convention of the receiving community for a particular extra string is to have it after the subject prefix, the string <rfc> can be prefixed with a dash ("-") to signal that the rest of the <rfc> string should be appended to the subject prefix instead, e.g., --rfc='-(WIP)' results in "PATCH (WIP)".

-v <n> , --reroll-count=<n>
Mark the series as the <n>-th iteration of the topic. The output filenames have v<n> prepended to them, and the subject prefix ("PATCH" by default, but configurable via the --subject-prefix option) has ` v<n>` appended to it. E.g. --reroll-count=4 may produce v4-0001-add-makefile.patch file that has "Subject: [PATCH v4 1/20] Add makefile" in it. <n> does not have to be an integer (e.g. "--reroll-count=4.4", or "--reroll-count=4rev2" are allowed), but the downside of using such a reroll-count is that the range-diff/interdiff with the previous version does not state exactly which version the new iteration is compared against.
--to=<email>
Add a To: header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. The negated form --no-to discards all To: headers added so far (from config or command line).
--cc=<email>
Add a Cc: header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. The negated form --no-cc discards all Cc: headers added so far (from config or command line).
--from , --from=<ident>

Use ident in the From: header of each commit email. If the author ident of the commit is not textually identical to the provided ident, place a From: header in the body of the message with the original author. If no ident is given, use the committer ident.

Note that this option is only useful if you are actually sending the emails and want to identify yourself as the sender, but retain the original author (and git am will correctly pick up the in-body header). Note also that git send-email already handles this transformation for you, and this option should not be used if you are feeding the result to git send-email.

--[no-]force-in-body-from
With the e-mail sender specified via the --from option, by default, an in-body "From:" to identify the real author of the commit is added at the top of the commit log message if the sender is different from the author. With this option, the in-body "From:" is added even when the sender and the author have the same name and address, which may help if the mailing list software mangles the sender's identity. Defaults to the value of the format.forceInBodyFrom configuration variable.
--add-header=<header>
Add an arbitrary header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. For example, --add-header="Organization: git-foo". The negated form --no-add-header discards all (To:, Cc:, and custom) headers added so far from config or command line.
--[no-]cover-letter
In addition to the patches, generate a cover letter file containing the branch description, shortlog and the overall diffstat. You can fill in a description in the file before sending it out.
--encode-email-headers , --no-encode-email-headers
Encode email headers that have non-ASCII characters with "Q-encoding" (described in RFC 2047), instead of outputting the headers verbatim. Defaults to the value of the format.encodeEmailHeaders configuration variable.
--interdiff=<previous>
As a reviewer aid, insert an interdiff into the cover letter, or as commentary of the lone patch of a 1-patch series, showing the differences between the previous version of the patch series and the series currently being formatted. previous is a single revision naming the tip of the previous series which shares a common base with the series being formatted (for example git format-patch --cover-letter --interdiff=feature/v1 -3 feature/v2).
--range-diff=<previous>

As a reviewer aid, insert a range-diff (see the section called “git-range-diff(1)”) into the cover letter, or as commentary of the lone patch of a 1-patch series, showing the differences between the previous version of the patch series and the series currently being formatted. previous can be a single revision naming the tip of the previous series if it shares a common base with the series being formatted (for example git format-patch --cover-letter --range-diff=feature/v1 -3 feature/v2), or a revision range if the two versions of the series are disjoint (for example git format-patch --cover-letter --range-diff=feature/v1~3..feature/v1 -3 feature/v2).

Note that diff options passed to the command affect how the primary product of format-patch is generated, and they are not passed to the underlying range-diff machinery used to generate the cover-letter material (this may change in the future).

--creation-factor=<percent>

Used with --range-diff, tweak the heuristic which matches up commits between the previous and current series of patches by adjusting the creation/deletion cost fudge factor. See the section called “git-range-diff(1)”) for details.

Defaults to 999 (the the section called “git-range-diff(1)” uses 60), as the use case is to show comparison with an older iteration of the same topic and the tool should find more correspondence between the two sets of patches.

--notes[=<ref>] , --no-notes

Append the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) for the commit after the three-dash line.

The expected use case of this is to write supporting explanation for the commit that does not belong to the commit log message proper, and include it with the patch submission. While one can simply write these explanations after format-patch has run but before sending, keeping them as Git notes allows them to be maintained between versions of the patch series (but see the discussion of the notes.rewrite configuration options in the section called “git-notes(1)” to use this workflow).

The default is --no-notes, unless the format.notes configuration is set.

--[no-]signature=<signature>
Add a signature to each message produced. Per RFC 3676 the signature is separated from the body by a line with '-- ' on it. If the signature option is omitted the signature defaults to the Git version number.
--signature-file=<file>
Works just like --signature except the signature is read from a file.
--suffix=.<sfx>

Instead of using .patch as the suffix for generated filenames, use specified suffix. A common alternative is --suffix=.txt. Leaving this empty will remove the .patch suffix.

Note that the leading character does not have to be a dot; for example, you can use --suffix=-patch to get 0001-description-of-my-change-patch.

-q , --quiet
Do not print the names of the generated files to standard output.
--no-binary
Do not output contents of changes in binary files, instead display a notice that those files changed. Patches generated using this option cannot be applied properly, but they are still useful for code review.
--zero-commit
Output an all-zero hash in each patch's From header instead of the hash of the commit.
--[no-]base[=<commit>]
Record the base tree information to identify the state the patch series applies to. See the BASE TREE INFORMATION section below for details. If <commit> is "auto", a base commit is automatically chosen. The --no-base option overrides a format.useAutoBase configuration.
--root
Treat the revision argument as a <revision-range>, even if it is just a single commit (that would normally be treated as a <since>). Note that root commits included in the specified range are always formatted as creation patches, independently of this flag.
--progress
Show progress reports on stderr as patches are generated.

CONFIGURATION

You can specify extra mail header lines to be added to each message, defaults for the subject prefix and file suffix, number patches when outputting more than one patch, add "To:" or "Cc:" headers, configure attachments, change the patch output directory, and sign off patches with configuration variables.

[format]
        headers = "Organization: git-foo\n"
        subjectPrefix = CHANGE
        suffix = .txt
        numbered = auto
        to = <email>
        cc = <email>
        attach [ = mime-boundary-string ]
        signOff = true
        outputDirectory = <directory>
        coverLetter = auto
        coverFromDescription = auto

DISCUSSION

The patch produced by git format-patch is in UNIX mailbox format, with a fixed "magic" time stamp to indicate that the file is output from format-patch rather than a real mailbox, like so:

From 8f72bad1baf19a53459661343e21d6491c3908d3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:42:54 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] =?UTF-8?q?[IA64]=20Put=20ia64=20config=20files=20on=20the=20?=
 =?UTF-8?q?Uwe=20Kleine-K=C3=B6nig=20diet?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

arch/arm config files were slimmed down using a python script
(See commit c2330e286f68f1c408b4aa6515ba49d57f05beae comment)

Do the same for ia64 so we can have sleek & trim looking
...

Typically it will be placed in a MUA's drafts folder, edited to add timely commentary that should not go in the changelog after the three dashes, and then sent as a message whose body, in our example, starts with "arch/arm config files were…". On the receiving end, readers can save interesting patches in a UNIX mailbox and apply them with the section called “git-am(1)”.

When a patch is part of an ongoing discussion, the patch generated by git format-patch can be tweaked to take advantage of the git am --scissors feature. After your response to the discussion comes a line that consists solely of "-- >8 --" (scissors and perforation), followed by the patch with unnecessary header fields removed:

...
> So we should do such-and-such.

Makes sense to me.  How about this patch?

-- >8 --
Subject: [IA64] Put ia64 config files on the Uwe Kleine-König diet

arch/arm config files were slimmed down using a python script
...

When sending a patch this way, most often you are sending your own patch, so in addition to the "From $SHA1 $magic_timestamp" marker you should omit From: and Date: lines from the patch file. The patch title is likely to be different from the subject of the discussion the patch is in response to, so it is likely that you would want to keep the Subject: line, like the example above.

Checking for patch corruption

Many mailers if not set up properly will corrupt whitespace. Here are two common types of corruption:

  • Empty context lines that do not have any whitespace.
  • Non-empty context lines that have one extra whitespace at the beginning.

One way to test if your MUA is set up correctly is:

  • Send the patch to yourself, exactly the way you would, except with To: and Cc: lines that do not contain the list and maintainer address.
  • Save that patch to a file in UNIX mailbox format. Call it a.patch, say.
  • Apply it:

    $ git fetch <project> master:test-apply
    $ git switch test-apply
    $ git restore --source=HEAD --staged --worktree :/
    $ git am a.patch

If it does not apply correctly, there can be various reasons.

  • The patch itself does not apply cleanly. That is bad but does not have much to do with your MUA. You might want to rebase the patch with the section called “git-rebase(1)” before regenerating it in this case.
  • The MUA corrupted your patch; "am" would complain that the patch does not apply. Look in the .git/rebase-apply/ subdirectory and see what patch file contains and check for the common corruption patterns mentioned above.
  • While at it, check the info and final-commit files as well. If what is in final-commit is not exactly what you would want to see in the commit log message, it is very likely that the receiver would end up hand editing the log message when applying your patch. Things like "Hi, this is my first patch.\n" in the patch e-mail should come after the three-dash line that signals the end of the commit message.

MUA-SPECIFIC HINTS

Here are some hints on how to successfully submit patches inline using various mailers.

GMail

GMail does not have any way to turn off line wrapping in the web interface, so it will mangle any emails that you send. You can however use "git send-email" and send your patches through the GMail SMTP server, or use any IMAP email client to connect to the google IMAP server and forward the emails through that.

For hints on using git send-email to send your patches through the GMail SMTP server, see the EXAMPLE section of the section called “git-send-email(1)”.

For hints on submission using the IMAP interface, see the EXAMPLE section of the section called “git-imap-send(1)”.

Thunderbird

By default, Thunderbird will both wrap emails as well as flag them as being format=flowed, both of which will make the resulting email unusable by Git.

There are three different approaches: use an add-on to turn off line wraps, configure Thunderbird to not mangle patches, or use an external editor to keep Thunderbird from mangling the patches.

Approach #1 (add-on)

Install the Toggle Word Wrap add-on that is available from https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/toggle-word-wrap/ It adds a menu entry "Enable Word Wrap" in the composer's "Options" menu that you can tick off. Now you can compose the message as you otherwise do (cut + paste, git format-patch | git imap-send, etc), but you have to insert line breaks manually in any text that you type.

Approach #2 (configuration)

Three steps:

  1. Configure your mail server composition as plain text: Edit…Account Settings…Composition & Addressing, uncheck "Compose Messages in HTML".
  2. Configure your general composition window to not wrap.

    In Thunderbird 2: Edit..Preferences..Composition, wrap plain text messages at 0

    In Thunderbird 3: Edit..Preferences..Advanced..Config Editor. Search for "mail.wrap_long_lines". Toggle it to make sure it is set to false. Also, search for "mailnews.wraplength" and set the value to 0.

  3. Disable the use of format=flowed: Edit..Preferences..Advanced..Config Editor. Search for "mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed". Toggle it to make sure it is set to false.

After that is done, you should be able to compose email as you otherwise would (cut + paste, git format-patch | git imap-send, etc), and the patches will not be mangled.

Approach #3 (external editor)

The following Thunderbird extensions are needed: AboutConfig from https://mjg.github.io/AboutConfig/ and External Editor from https://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=8

  1. Prepare the patch as a text file using your method of choice.
  2. Before opening a compose window, use Edit→Account Settings to uncheck the "Compose messages in HTML format" setting in the "Composition & Addressing" panel of the account to be used to send the patch.
  3. In the main Thunderbird window, before you open the compose window for the patch, use Tools→about:config to set the following to the indicated values:

            mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed  => false
            mailnews.wraplength             => 0
  4. Open a compose window and click the external editor icon.
  5. In the external editor window, read in the patch file and exit the editor normally.

Side note: it may be possible to do step 2 with about:config and the following settings but no one's tried yet.

        mail.html_compose                       => false
        mail.identity.default.compose_html      => false
        mail.identity.id?.compose_html          => false

There is a script in contrib/thunderbird-patch-inline which can help you include patches with Thunderbird in an easy way. To use it, do the steps above and then use the script as the external editor.

KMail

This should help you to submit patches inline using KMail.

  1. Prepare the patch as a text file.
  2. Click on New Mail.
  3. Go under "Options" in the Composer window and be sure that "Word wrap" is not set.
  4. Use Message → Insert file… and insert the patch.
  5. Back in the compose window: add whatever other text you wish to the message, complete the addressing and subject fields, and press send.

BASE TREE INFORMATION

The base tree information block is used for maintainers or third party testers to know the exact state the patch series applies to. It consists of the base commit, which is a well-known commit that is part of the stable part of the project history everybody else works off of, and zero or more prerequisite patches, which are well-known patches in flight that is not yet part of the base commit that need to be applied on top of base commit in topological order before the patches can be applied.

The base commit is shown as "base-commit: " followed by the 40-hex of the commit object name. A prerequisite patch is shown as "prerequisite-patch-id: " followed by the 40-hex patch id, which can be obtained by passing the patch through the git patch-id --stable command.

Imagine that on top of the public commit P, you applied well-known patches X, Y and Z from somebody else, and then built your three-patch series A, B, C, the history would be like:

---P---X---Y---Z---A---B---C

With git format-patch --base=P -3 C (or variants thereof, e.g. with --cover-letter or using Z..C instead of -3 C to specify the range), the base tree information block is shown at the end of the first message the command outputs (either the first patch, or the cover letter), like this:

base-commit: P
prerequisite-patch-id: X
prerequisite-patch-id: Y
prerequisite-patch-id: Z

For non-linear topology, such as

---P---X---A---M---C
    \         /
     Y---Z---B

You can also use git format-patch --base=P -3 C to generate patches for A, B and C, and the identifiers for P, X, Y, Z are appended at the end of the first message.

If set --base=auto in cmdline, it will automatically compute the base commit as the merge base of tip commit of the remote-tracking branch and revision-range specified in cmdline. For a local branch, you need to make it to track a remote branch by git branch --set-upstream-to before using this option.

EXAMPLES

  • Extract commits between revisions R1 and R2, and apply them on top of the current branch using git am to cherry-pick them:

    $ git format-patch -k --stdout R1..R2 | git am -3 -k
  • Extract all commits which are in the current branch but not in the origin branch:

    $ git format-patch origin

    For each commit a separate file is created in the current directory.

  • Extract all commits that lead to origin since the inception of the project:

    $ git format-patch --root origin
  • The same as the previous one:

    $ git format-patch -M -B origin

    Additionally, it detects and handles renames and complete rewrites intelligently to produce a renaming patch. A renaming patch reduces the amount of text output, and generally makes it easier to review. Note that non-Git "patch" programs won't understand renaming patches, so use it only when you know the recipient uses Git to apply your patch.

  • Extract three topmost commits from the current branch and format them as e-mailable patches:

    $ git format-patch -3

CAVEATS

Note that format-patch will omit merge commits from the output, even if they are part of the requested range. A simple "patch" does not include enough information for the receiving end to reproduce the same merge commit.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fsck-objects(1)

NAME

git-fsck-objects - Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database

SYNOPSIS

git fsck-objects …

DESCRIPTION

This is a synonym for the section called “git-fsck(1)”. Please refer to the documentation of that command.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fsck(1)

NAME

git-fsck - Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database

SYNOPSIS

git fsck [--tags] [--root] [--unreachable] [--cache] [--no-reflogs]
         [--[no-]full] [--strict] [--verbose] [--lost-found]
         [--[no-]dangling] [--[no-]progress] [--connectivity-only]
         [--[no-]name-objects] [--[no-]references] [<object>…]

DESCRIPTION

Verifies the connectivity and validity of the objects in the database.

OPTIONS

<object>

An object to treat as the head of an unreachability trace.

If no objects are given, git fsck defaults to using the index file, all SHA-1 references in the refs namespace, and all reflogs (unless --no-reflogs is given) as heads.

--unreachable
Print out objects that exist but that aren't reachable from any of the reference nodes.
--[no-]dangling
Print objects that exist but that are never directly used (default). --no-dangling can be used to omit this information from the output.
--root
Report root nodes.
--tags
Report tags.
--cache
Consider any object recorded in the index also as a head node for an unreachability trace.
--no-reflogs
Do not consider commits that are referenced only by an entry in a reflog to be reachable. This option is meant only to search for commits that used to be in a ref, but now aren't, but are still in that corresponding reflog.
--full
Check not just objects in GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY ($GIT_DIR/objects), but also the ones found in alternate object pools listed in GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES or $GIT_DIR/objects/info/alternates, and in packed Git archives found in $GIT_DIR/objects/pack and corresponding pack subdirectories in alternate object pools. This is now default; you can turn it off with --no-full.
--connectivity-only

Check only the connectivity of reachable objects, making sure that any objects referenced by a reachable tag, commit, or tree are present. This speeds up the operation by avoiding reading blobs entirely (though it does still check that referenced blobs exist). This will detect corruption in commits and trees, but not do any semantic checks (e.g., for format errors). Corruption in blob objects will not be detected at all.

Unreachable tags, commits, and trees will also be accessed to find the tips of dangling segments of history. Use --no-dangling if you don't care about this output and want to speed it up further.

--strict
Enable more strict checking, namely to catch a file mode recorded with g+w bit set, which was created by older versions of Git. Existing repositories, including the Linux kernel, Git itself, and sparse repository have old objects that trigger this check, but it is recommended to check new projects with this flag.
--verbose
Be chatty.
--lost-found
Write dangling objects into .git/lost-found/commit/ or .git/lost-found/other/, depending on type. If the object is a blob, the contents are written into the file, rather than its object name.
--name-objects
When displaying names of reachable objects, in addition to the SHA-1 also display a name that describes how they are reachable, compatible with the section called “git-rev-parse(1)”, e.g. HEAD@{1234567890}~25^2:src/.
--[no-]progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --no-progress or --verbose is specified. --progress forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--[no-]references
Control whether to check the references database consistency via git refs verify. See the section called “git-refs(1)” for details. The default is to check the references database.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

fsck.<msg-id>

During fsck git may find issues with legacy data which wouldn't be generated by current versions of git, and which wouldn't be sent over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set. This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories containing such data.

Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by the section called “git-fsck(1)”, but to accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead, or to clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>.

The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but the same applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and fetch.fsck.*. variables.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor, the receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> variables will not fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration if they aren't set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.

In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go unnoticed.

Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> will only cause git to warn.

See the Fsck Messages section of the section called “git-fsck(1)” for supported values of <msg-id>.

fsck.skipList

The path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later, comments (#), empty lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace are ignored. Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.

This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored, such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this setting.

Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren't set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement; the object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list. After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so there's now no reason to pre-sort the list.

DISCUSSION

git-fsck tests SHA-1 and general object sanity, and it does full tracking of the resulting reachability and everything else. It prints out any corruption it finds (missing or bad objects), and if you use the --unreachable flag it will also print out objects that exist but that aren't reachable from any of the specified head nodes (or the default set, as mentioned above).

Any corrupt objects you will have to find in backups or other archives (i.e., you can just remove them and do an rsync with some other site in the hopes that somebody else has the object you have corrupted).

If core.commitGraph is true, the commit-graph file will also be inspected using git commit-graph verify. See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)”.

Extracted Diagnostics

unreachable <type> <object>
The <type> object <object>, isn't actually referred to directly or indirectly in any of the trees or commits seen. This can mean that there's another root node that you're not specifying or that the tree is corrupt. If you haven't missed a root node then you might as well delete unreachable nodes since they can't be used.
missing <type> <object>
The <type> object <object>, is referred to but isn't present in the database.
dangling <type> <object>
The <type> object <object>, is present in the database but never directly used. A dangling commit could be a root node.
hash mismatch <object>
The database has an object whose hash doesn't match the object database value. This indicates a serious data integrity problem.

FSCK MESSAGES

The following lists the types of errors git fsck detects and what each error means, with their default severity. The severity of the error, other than those that are marked as "(FATAL)", can be tweaked by setting the corresponding fsck.<msg-id> configuration variable.

badDate
(ERROR) Invalid date format in an author/committer line.
badDateOverflow
(ERROR) Invalid date value in an author/committer line.
badEmail
(ERROR) Invalid email format in an author/committer line.
badFilemode
(INFO) A tree contains a bad filemode entry.
badName
(ERROR) An author/committer name is empty.
badObjectSha1
(ERROR) An object has a bad sha1.
badPackedRefEntry
(ERROR) The "packed-refs" file contains an invalid entry.
badPackedRefHeader
(ERROR) The "packed-refs" file contains an invalid header.
badParentSha1
(ERROR) A commit object has a bad parent sha1.
badRefContent
(ERROR) A ref has bad content.
badRefFiletype
(ERROR) A ref has a bad file type.
badRefName
(ERROR) A ref has an invalid format.
badReferentName
(ERROR) The referent name of a symref is invalid.
badTagName
(INFO) A tag has an invalid format.
badTimezone
(ERROR) Found an invalid time zone in an author/committer line.
badTree
(ERROR) A tree cannot be parsed.
badTreeSha1
(ERROR) A tree has an invalid format.
badType
(ERROR) Found an invalid object type.
duplicateEntries
(ERROR) A tree contains duplicate file entries.
emptyName
(WARN) A path contains an empty name.
emptyPackedRefsFile
(INFO) "packed-refs" file is empty. Report to the git@vger.kernel.org mailing list if you see this error. As only very early versions of Git would create such an empty "packed_refs" file, we might tighten this rule in the future.
extraHeaderEntry
(IGNORE) Extra headers found after tagger.
fullPathname
(WARN) A path contains the full path starting with "/".
gitattributesBlob
(ERROR) A non-blob found at .gitattributes.
gitattributesLarge
(ERROR) The .gitattributes blob is too large.
gitattributesLineLength
(ERROR) The .gitattributes blob contains too long lines.
gitattributesMissing
(ERROR) Unable to read .gitattributes blob.
gitattributesSymlink
(INFO) .gitattributes is a symlink.
gitignoreSymlink
(INFO) .gitignore is a symlink.
gitmodulesBlob
(ERROR) A non-blob found at .gitmodules.
gitmodulesLarge
(ERROR) The .gitmodules file is too large to parse.
gitmodulesMissing
(ERROR) Unable to read .gitmodules blob.
gitmodulesName
(ERROR) A submodule name is invalid.
gitmodulesParse
(INFO) Could not parse .gitmodules blob.

gitmodulesLarge; (ERROR) .gitmodules blob is too large to parse.

gitmodulesPath
(ERROR) .gitmodules path is invalid.
gitmodulesSymlink
(ERROR) .gitmodules is a symlink.
gitmodulesUpdate
(ERROR) Found an invalid submodule update setting.
gitmodulesUrl
(ERROR) Found an invalid submodule url.
hasDot
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named ..
hasDotdot
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named ...
hasDotgit
(WARN) A tree contains an entry named .git.
largePathname
(WARN) A tree contains an entry with a very long path name. If the value of fsck.largePathname contains a colon, that value is used as the maximum allowable length (e.g., "warn:10" would complain about any path component of 11 or more bytes). The default value is 4096.
mailmapSymlink
(INFO) .mailmap is a symlink.
missingAuthor
(ERROR) Author is missing.
missingCommitter
(ERROR) Committer is missing.
missingEmail
(ERROR) Email is missing in an author/committer line.
missingNameBeforeEmail
(ERROR) Missing name before an email in an author/committer line.
missingObject
(ERROR) Missing object line in tag object.
missingSpaceBeforeDate
(ERROR) Missing space before date in an author/committer line.
missingSpaceBeforeEmail
(ERROR) Missing space before the email in an author/committer line.
missingTag
(ERROR) Unexpected end after type line in a tag object.
missingTagEntry
(ERROR) Missing tag line in a tag object.
missingTaggerEntry
(INFO) Missing tagger line in a tag object.
missingTree
(ERROR) Missing tree line in a commit object.
missingType
(ERROR) Invalid type value on the type line in a tag object.
missingTypeEntry
(ERROR) Missing type line in a tag object.
multipleAuthors
(ERROR) Multiple author lines found in a commit.
nulInCommit
(WARN) Found a NUL byte in the commit object body.
nulInHeader
(FATAL) NUL byte exists in the object header.
nullSha1
(WARN) Tree contains entries pointing to a null sha1.
packedRefEntryNotTerminated
(ERROR) The "packed-refs" file contains an entry that is not terminated by a newline.
packedRefUnsorted
(ERROR) The "packed-refs" file is not sorted.
refMissingNewline
(INFO) A loose ref that does not end with newline(LF). As valid implementations of Git never created such a loose ref file, it may become an error in the future. Report to the git@vger.kernel.org mailing list if you see this error, as we need to know what tools created such a file.
symlinkRef
(INFO) A symbolic link is used as a symref. Report to the git@vger.kernel.org mailing list if you see this error, as we are assessing the feasibility of dropping the support to drop creating symbolic links as symrefs.
symrefTargetIsNotARef
(INFO) The target of a symbolic reference points neither to a root reference nor to a reference starting with "refs/". Although we allow create a symref pointing to the referent which is outside the "ref" by using git symbolic-ref, we may tighten the rule in the future. Report to the git@vger.kernel.org mailing list if you see this error, as we need to know what tools created such a file.
trailingRefContent
(INFO) A loose ref has trailing content. As valid implementations of Git never created such a loose ref file, it may become an error in the future. Report to the git@vger.kernel.org mailing list if you see this error, as we need to know what tools created such a file.
treeNotSorted
(ERROR) A tree is not properly sorted.
unknownType
(ERROR) Found an unknown object type.
unterminatedHeader
(FATAL) Missing end-of-line in the object header.
zeroPaddedDate
(ERROR) Found a zero padded date in an author/committer line.
zeroPaddedFilemode
(WARN) Found a zero padded filemode in a tree.

Environment Variables

GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY
used to specify the object database root (usually $GIT_DIR/objects)
GIT_INDEX_FILE
used to specify the index file of the index
GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES
used to specify additional object database roots (usually unset)

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-fsmonitor--daemon(1)

NAME

git-fsmonitor--daemon - A Built-in Filesystem Monitor

SYNOPSIS

git fsmonitor--daemon start
git fsmonitor--daemon run
git fsmonitor--daemon stop
git fsmonitor--daemon status

DESCRIPTION

A daemon to watch the working directory for file and directory changes using platform-specific filesystem notification facilities.

This daemon communicates directly with commands like git status using the simple IPC interface instead of the slower the section called “githooks(5)” interface.

This daemon is built into Git so that no third-party tools are required.

OPTIONS

start
Starts a daemon in the background.
run
Runs a daemon in the foreground.
stop
Stops the daemon running in the current working directory, if present.
status
Exits with zero status if a daemon is watching the current working directory.

REMARKS

This daemon is a long running process used to watch a single working directory and maintain a list of the recently changed files and directories. Performance of commands such as git status can be increased if they just ask for a summary of changes to the working directory and can avoid scanning the disk.

When core.fsmonitor is set to true (see the section called “git-config(1)”) commands, such as git status, will ask the daemon for changes and automatically start it (if necessary).

For more information see the "File System Monitor" section in the section called “git-update-index(1)”.

CAVEATS

The fsmonitor daemon does not currently know about submodules and does not know to filter out filesystem events that happen within a submodule. If fsmonitor daemon is watching a super repo and a file is modified within the working directory of a submodule, it will report the change (as happening against the super repo). However, the client will properly ignore these extra events, so performance may be affected but it will not cause an incorrect result.

By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with network-mounted repositories; this may be overridden by setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to true. Note, however, that the fsmonitor daemon is not guaranteed to work correctly with all network-mounted repositories, so such use is considered experimental.

On Mac OS, the inter-process communication (IPC) between various Git commands and the fsmonitor daemon is done via a Unix domain socket (UDS) -- a special type of file -- which is supported by native Mac OS filesystems, but not on network-mounted filesystems, NTFS, or FAT32. Other filesystems may or may not have the needed support; the fsmonitor daemon is not guaranteed to work with these filesystems and such use is considered experimental.

By default, the socket is created in the .git directory. However, if the .git directory is on a network-mounted filesystem, it will instead be created at $HOME/.git-fsmonitor-* unless $HOME itself is on a network-mounted filesystem, in which case you must set the configuration variable fsmonitor.socketDir to the path of a directory on a Mac OS native filesystem in which to create the socket file.

If none of the above directories (.git, $HOME, or fsmonitor.socketDir) is on a native Mac OS file filesystem the fsmonitor daemon will report an error that will cause the daemon and the currently running command to exit.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

fsmonitor.allowRemote
By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with network-mounted repositories. Setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to true overrides this behavior. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.
fsmonitor.socketDir
This Mac OS-specific option, if set, specifies the directory in which to create the Unix domain socket used for communication between the fsmonitor daemon and various Git commands. The directory must reside on a native Mac OS filesystem. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-gc(1)

NAME

git-gc - Cleanup unnecessary files and optimize the local repository

SYNOPSIS

git gc [--aggressive] [--auto] [--[no-]detach] [--quiet] [--prune=<date> | --no-prune] [--force] [--keep-largest-pack]

DESCRIPTION

Runs a number of housekeeping tasks within the current repository, such as compressing file revisions (to reduce disk space and increase performance), removing unreachable objects which may have been created from prior invocations of git add, packing refs, pruning reflog, rerere metadata or stale working trees. May also update ancillary indexes such as the commit-graph.

When common porcelain operations that create objects are run, they will check whether the repository has grown substantially since the last maintenance, and if so run git gc automatically. See gc.auto below for how to disable this behavior.

Running git gc manually should only be needed when adding objects to a repository without regularly running such porcelain commands, to do a one-off repository optimization, or e.g. to clean up a suboptimal mass-import. See the "PACKFILE OPTIMIZATION" section in the section called “git-fast-import(1)” for more details on the import case.

OPTIONS

--aggressive
Usually git gc runs very quickly while providing good disk space utilization and performance. This option will cause git gc to more aggressively optimize the repository at the expense of taking much more time. The effects of this optimization are mostly persistent. See the "AGGRESSIVE" section below for details.
--auto

With this option, git gc checks whether any housekeeping is required; if not, it exits without performing any work.

See the gc.auto option in the "CONFIGURATION" section below for how this heuristic works.

Once housekeeping is triggered by exceeding the limits of configuration options such as gc.auto and gc.autoPackLimit, all other housekeeping tasks (e.g. rerere, working trees, reflog…) will be performed as well.

--[no-]detach
Run in the background if the system supports it. This option overrides the gc.autoDetach config.
--[no-]cruft
When expiring unreachable objects, pack them separately into a cruft pack instead of storing them as loose objects. --cruft is on by default.
--max-cruft-size=<n>
When packing unreachable objects into a cruft pack, limit the size of new cruft packs to be at most <n> bytes. Overrides any value specified via the gc.maxCruftSize configuration. See the --max-cruft-size option of the section called “git-repack(1)” for more.
--expire-to=<dir>
When packing unreachable objects into a cruft pack, write a cruft pack containing pruned objects (if any) to the directory <dir>. This option only has an effect when used together with --cruft. See the --expire-to option of the section called “git-repack(1)” for more information.
--prune=<date>
Prune loose objects older than date (default is 2 weeks ago, overridable by the config variable gc.pruneExpire). --prune=now prunes loose objects regardless of their age and increases the risk of corruption if another process is writing to the repository concurrently; see "NOTES" below. --prune is on by default.
--no-prune
Do not prune any loose objects.
--quiet
Suppress all progress reports.
--force
Force git gc to run even if there may be another git gc instance running on this repository.
--keep-largest-pack
All packs except the largest non-cruft pack, any packs marked with a .keep file, and any cruft pack(s) are consolidated into a single pack. When this option is used, gc.bigPackThreshold is ignored.

AGGRESSIVE

When the --aggressive option is supplied, the section called “git-repack(1)” will be invoked with the -f flag, which in turn will pass --no-reuse-delta to the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”. This will throw away any existing deltas and re-compute them, at the expense of spending much more time on the repacking.

The effects of this are mostly persistent, e.g. when packs and loose objects are coalesced into one another pack the existing deltas in that pack might get re-used, but there are also various cases where we might pick a sub-optimal delta from a newer pack instead.

Furthermore, supplying --aggressive will tweak the --depth and --window options passed to the section called “git-repack(1)”. See the gc.aggressiveDepth and gc.aggressiveWindow settings below. By using a larger window size we're more likely to find more optimal deltas.

It's probably not worth it to use this option on a given repository without running tailored performance benchmarks on it. It takes a lot more time, and the resulting space/delta optimization may or may not be worth it. Not using this at all is the right trade-off for most users and their repositories.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

gc.aggressiveDepth

The depth parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 50, which is the default for the --depth option when --aggressive isn't in use.

See the documentation for the --depth option in the section called “git-repack(1)” for more details.

gc.aggressiveWindow

The window size parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 250, which is a much more aggressive window size than the default --window of 10.

See the documentation for the --window option in the section called “git-repack(1)” for more details.

gc.auto

When there are approximately more than this many loose objects in the repository, git gc --auto will pack them. Some Porcelain commands use this command to perform a light-weight garbage collection from time to time. The default value is 6700.

Setting this to 0 disables not only automatic packing based on the number of loose objects, but also any other heuristic git gc --auto will otherwise use to determine if there's work to do, such as gc.autoPackLimit.

gc.autoPackLimit

When there are more than this many packs that are not marked with *.keep file in the repository, git gc --auto consolidates them into one larger pack. The default value is 50. Setting this to 0 disables it. Setting gc.auto to 0 will also disable this.

See the gc.bigPackThreshold configuration variable below. When in use, it'll affect how the auto pack limit works.

gc.autoDetach
Make git gc --auto return immediately and run in the background if the system supports it. Default is true. This config variable acts as a fallback in case maintenance.autoDetach is not set.
gc.bigPackThreshold

If non-zero, all non-cruft packs larger than this limit are kept when git gc is run. This is very similar to --keep-largest-pack except that all non-cruft packs that meet the threshold are kept, not just the largest pack. Defaults to zero. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

Note that if the number of kept packs is more than gc.autoPackLimit, this configuration variable is ignored, all packs except the base pack will be repacked. After this the number of packs should go below gc.autoPackLimit and gc.bigPackThreshold should be respected again.

If the amount of memory estimated for git repack to run smoothly is not available and gc.bigPackThreshold is not set, the largest pack will also be excluded (this is the equivalent of running git gc with --keep-largest-pack).

gc.writeCommitGraph
If true, then gc will rewrite the commit-graph file when the section called “git-gc(1)” is run. When using git gc --auto the commit-graph will be updated if housekeeping is required. Default is true. See the section called “git-commit-graph(1)” for details.
gc.logExpiry
If the file gc.log exists, then git gc --auto will print its content and exit with status zero instead of running unless that file is more than gc.logExpiry old. Default is "1.day". See gc.pruneExpire for more ways to specify its value.
gc.packRefs
Running git pack-refs in a repository renders it unclonable by Git versions prior to 1.5.1.2 over dumb transports such as HTTP. This variable determines whether git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set to notbare to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. The default is true.
gc.cruftPacks
Store unreachable objects in a cruft pack (see the section called “git-repack(1)”) instead of as loose objects. The default is true.
gc.maxCruftSize
Limit the size of new cruft packs when repacking. When specified in addition to --max-cruft-size, the command line option takes priority. See the --max-cruft-size option of the section called “git-repack(1)”.
gc.pruneExpire
When git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago (and repack --cruft --cruft-expiration 2.weeks.ago if using cruft packs via gc.cruftPacks or --cruft). Override the grace period with this config variable. The value "now" may be used to disable this grace period and always prune unreachable objects immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. This feature helps prevent corruption when git gc runs concurrently with another process writing to the repository; see the "NOTES" section of the section called “git-gc(1)”.
gc.worktreePruneExpire
When git gc is run, it calls git worktree prune --expire 3.months.ago. This config variable can be used to set a different grace period. The value "now" may be used to disable the grace period and prune $GIT_DIR/worktrees immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning.
gc.reflogExpire , gc.<pattern>.reflogExpire
git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.
gc.reflogExpireUnreachable , gc.<pattern>.reflogExpireUnreachable

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

These types of entries are generally created as a result of using git commit --amend or git rebase and are the commits prior to the amend or rebase occurring. Since these changes are not part of the current project most users will want to expire them sooner, which is why the default is more aggressive than gc.reflogExpire.

gc.recentObjectsHook

When considering whether or not to remove an object (either when generating a cruft pack or storing unreachable objects as loose), use the shell to execute the specified command(s). Interpret their output as object IDs which Git will consider as "recent", regardless of their age. By treating their mtimes as "now", any objects (and their descendants) mentioned in the output will be kept regardless of their true age.

Output must contain exactly one hex object ID per line, and nothing else. Objects which cannot be found in the repository are ignored. Multiple hooks are supported, but all must exit successfully, else the operation (either generating a cruft pack or unpacking unreachable objects) will be halted.

gc.repackFilter
When repacking, use the specified filter to move certain objects into a separate packfile. See the --filter=<filter-spec> option of the section called “git-repack(1)”.
gc.repackFilterTo
When repacking and using a filter, see gc.repackFilter, the specified location will be used to create the packfile containing the filtered out objects. WARNING: The specified location should be accessible, using for example the Git alternates mechanism, otherwise the repo could be considered corrupt by Git as it might not be able to access the objects in that packfile. See the --filter-to=<dir> option of the section called “git-repack(1)” and the objects/info/alternates section of the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”.
gc.rerereResolved
Records of conflicted merge you resolved earlier are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 60 days. See the section called “git-rerere(1)”.
gc.rerereUnresolved
Records of conflicted merge you have not resolved are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 15 days. See the section called “git-rerere(1)”.

NOTES

git gc tries very hard not to delete objects that are referenced anywhere in your repository. In particular, it will keep not only objects referenced by your current set of branches and tags, but also objects referenced by the index, remote-tracking branches, reflogs (which may reference commits in branches that were later amended or rewound), and anything else in the refs/* namespace. Note that a note (of the kind created by git notes) attached to an object does not contribute in keeping the object alive. If you are expecting some objects to be deleted and they aren't, check all of those locations and decide whether it makes sense in your case to remove those references.

On the other hand, when git gc runs concurrently with another process, there is a risk of it deleting an object that the other process is using but hasn't created a reference to. This may just cause the other process to fail or may corrupt the repository if the other process later adds a reference to the deleted object. Git has two features that significantly mitigate this problem:

  1. Any object with modification time newer than the --prune date is kept, along with everything reachable from it.
  2. Most operations that add an object to the database update the modification time of the object if it is already present so that #1 applies.

However, these features fall short of a complete solution, so users who run commands concurrently have to live with some risk of corruption (which seems to be low in practice).

HOOKS

The git gc --auto command will run the pre-auto-gc hook. See the section called “githooks(5)” for more information.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-get-tar-commit-id(1)

NAME

git-get-tar-commit-id - Extract commit ID from an archive created using git-archive

SYNOPSIS

git get-tar-commit-id

DESCRIPTION

Read a tar archive created by git archive from the standard input and extract the commit ID stored in it. It reads only the first 1024 bytes of input, thus its runtime is not influenced by the size of the tar archive very much.

If no commit ID is found, git get-tar-commit-id quietly exits with a return code of 1. This can happen if the archive had not been created using git archive or if the first parameter of git archive had been a tree ID instead of a commit ID or tag.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-grep(1)

NAME

git-grep - Print lines matching a pattern

SYNOPSIS

git grep [-a | --text] [-I] [--textconv] [-i | --ignore-case] [-w | --word-regexp]
           [-v | --invert-match] [-h|-H] [--full-name]
           [-E | --extended-regexp] [-G | --basic-regexp]
           [-P | --perl-regexp]
           [-F | --fixed-strings] [-n | --line-number] [--column]
           [-l | --files-with-matches] [-L | --files-without-match]
           [(-O | --open-files-in-pager) [<pager>]]
           [-z | --null]
           [ -o | --only-matching ] [-c | --count] [--all-match] [-q | --quiet]
           [--max-depth <depth>] [--[no-]recursive]
           [--color[=<when>] | --no-color]
           [--break] [--heading] [-p | --show-function]
           [-A <post-context>] [-B <pre-context>] [-C <context>]
           [-W | --function-context]
           [(-m | --max-count) <num>]
           [--threads <num>]
           [-f <file>] [-e] <pattern>
           [--and|--or|--not|(|)|-e <pattern>…]
           [--recurse-submodules] [--parent-basename <basename>]
           [ [--[no-]exclude-standard] [--cached | --untracked | --no-index] | <tree>…]
           [--] [<pathspec>…]

DESCRIPTION

Look for specified patterns in the tracked files in the work tree, blobs registered in the index file, or blobs in given tree objects. Patterns are lists of one or more search expressions separated by newline characters. An empty string as search expression matches all lines.

OPTIONS

--cached
Instead of searching tracked files in the working tree, search blobs registered in the index file.
--untracked
In addition to searching in the tracked files in the working tree, search also in untracked files.
--no-index

Search files in the current directory that is not managed by Git, or by ignoring that the current directory is managed by Git. This is rather similar to running the regular grep(1) utility with its -r option specified, but with some additional benefits, such as using pathspec patterns to limit paths; see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)” for more information.

This option cannot be used together with --cached or --untracked. See also grep.fallbackToNoIndex in CONFIGURATION below.

--no-exclude-standard
Also search in ignored files by not honoring the .gitignore mechanism. Only useful with --untracked.
--exclude-standard
Do not pay attention to ignored files specified via the .gitignore mechanism. Only useful when searching files in the current directory with --no-index.
--recurse-submodules
Recursively search in each submodule that is active and checked out in the repository. When used in combination with the <tree> option the prefix of all submodule output will be the name of the parent project's <tree> object. This option cannot be used together with --untracked, and it has no effect if --no-index is specified.
-a , --text
Process binary files as if they were text.
--textconv
Honor textconv filter settings.
--no-textconv
Do not honor textconv filter settings. This is the default.
-i , --ignore-case
Ignore case differences between the patterns and the files.
-I
Don't match the pattern in binary files.
--max-depth <depth>
For each <pathspec> given on command line, descend at most <depth> levels of directories. A value of -1 means no limit. This option is ignored if <pathspec> contains active wildcards. In other words if "a*" matches a directory named "a*", "*" is matched literally so --max-depth is still effective.
-r , --recursive
Same as --max-depth=-1; this is the default.
--no-recursive
Same as --max-depth=0.
-w , --word-regexp
Match the pattern only at word boundary (either begin at the beginning of a line, or preceded by a non-word character; end at the end of a line or followed by a non-word character).
-v , --invert-match
Select non-matching lines.
-h , -H
By default, the command shows the filename for each match. -h option is used to suppress this output. -H is there for completeness and does not do anything except it overrides -h given earlier on the command line.
--full-name
When run from a subdirectory, the command usually outputs paths relative to the current directory. This option forces paths to be output relative to the project top directory.
-E , --extended-regexp , -G , --basic-regexp
Use POSIX extended/basic regexp for patterns. Default is to use basic regexp.
-P , --perl-regexp

Use Perl-compatible regular expressions for patterns.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

-F , --fixed-strings
Use fixed strings for patterns (don't interpret pattern as a regex).
-n , --line-number
Prefix the line number to matching lines.
--column
Prefix the 1-indexed byte-offset of the first match from the start of the matching line.
-l , --files-with-matches , --name-only , -L , --files-without-match
Instead of showing every matched line, show only the names of files that contain (or do not contain) matches. For better compatibility with git diff, --name-only is a synonym for --files-with-matches.
-O[<pager>] , --open-files-in-pager[=<pager>]
Open the matching files in the pager (not the output of grep). If the pager happens to be "less" or "vi", and the user specified only one pattern, the first file is positioned at the first match automatically. The pager argument is optional; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. If pager is unspecified, the default pager will be used (see core.pager in the section called “git-config(1)”).
-z , --null
Use \0 as the delimiter for pathnames in the output, and print them verbatim. Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
-o , --only-matching
Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with each such part on a separate output line.
-c , --count
Instead of showing every matched line, show the number of lines that match.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored matches. The value must be always (the default), never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off match highlighting, even when the configuration file gives the default to color output. Same as --color=never.
--break
Print an empty line between matches from different files.
--heading
Show the filename above the matches in that file instead of at the start of each shown line.
-p , --show-function
Show the preceding line that contains the function name of the match, unless the matching line is a function name itself. The name is determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
-<num> , -C <num> , --context <num>
Show <num> leading and trailing lines, and place a line containing -- between contiguous groups of matches.
-A <num> , --after-context <num>
Show <num> trailing lines, and place a line containing -- between contiguous groups of matches.
-B <num> , --before-context <num>
Show <num> leading lines, and place a line containing -- between contiguous groups of matches.
-W , --function-context
Show the surrounding text from the previous line containing a function name up to the one before the next function name, effectively showing the whole function in which the match was found. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
-m <num> , --max-count <num>
Limit the amount of matches per file. When using the -v or --invert-match option, the search stops after the specified number of non-matches. A value of -1 will return unlimited results (the default). A value of 0 will exit immediately with a non-zero status.
--threads <num>
Number of grep worker threads to use. See NOTES ON THREADS and grep.threads in CONFIGURATION for more information.
-f <file>

Read patterns from <file>, one per line.

Passing the pattern via <file> allows for providing a search pattern containing a \0.

Not all pattern types support patterns containing \0. Git will error out if a given pattern type can't support such a pattern. The --perl-regexp pattern type when compiled against the PCRE v2 backend has the widest support for these types of patterns.

In versions of Git before 2.23.0 patterns containing \0 would be silently considered fixed. This was never documented, there were also odd and undocumented interactions between e.g. non-ASCII patterns containing \0 and --ignore-case.

In future versions we may learn to support patterns containing \0 for more search backends, until then we'll die when the pattern type in question doesn't support them.

-e
The next parameter is the pattern. This option has to be used for patterns starting with - and should be used in scripts passing user input to grep. Multiple patterns are combined by or.
--and , --or , --not , ( … )
Specify how multiple patterns are combined using Boolean expressions. --or is the default operator. --and has higher precedence than --or. -e has to be used for all patterns.
--all-match
When giving multiple pattern expressions combined with --or, this flag is specified to limit the match to files that have lines to match all of them.
-q , --quiet
Do not output matched lines; instead, exit with status 0 when there is a match and with non-zero status when there isn't.
<tree>…
Instead of searching tracked files in the working tree, search blobs in the given trees.
--
Signals the end of options; the rest of the parameters are <pathspec> limiters.
<pathspec>…

If given, limit the search to paths matching at least one pattern. Both leading paths match and glob(7) patterns are supported.

For more details about the <pathspec> syntax, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

EXAMPLES

git grep 'time_t' -- '*.[ch]'
Looks for time_t in all tracked .c and .h files in the working directory and its subdirectories.
git grep -e '#define' --and \( -e MAX_PATH -e PATH_MAX \)
Looks for a line that has #define and either MAX_PATH or PATH_MAX.
git grep --all-match -e NODE -e Unexpected
Looks for a line that has NODE or Unexpected in files that have lines that match both.
git grep solution -- :^Documentation
Looks for solution, excluding files in Documentation.

NOTES ON THREADS

The --threads option (and the grep.threads configuration) will be ignored when --open-files-in-pager is used, forcing a single-threaded execution.

When grepping the object store (with --cached or giving tree objects), running with multiple threads might perform slower than single-threaded if --textconv is given and there are too many text conversions. Thus, if low performance is experienced in this case, it might be desirable to use --threads=1.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

grep.lineNumber
If set to true, enable -n option by default.
grep.column
If set to true, enable the --column option by default.
grep.patternType
Set the default matching behavior. Using a value of basic, extended, fixed, or perl will enable the --basic-regexp, --extended-regexp, --fixed-strings, or --perl-regexp option accordingly, while the value default will use the grep.extendedRegexp option to choose between basic and extended.
grep.extendedRegexp
If set to true, enable --extended-regexp option by default. This option is ignored when the grep.patternType option is set to a value other than default.
grep.threads
Number of grep worker threads to use. If unset (or set to 0), Git will use as many threads as the number of logical cores available.
grep.fullName
If set to true, enable --full-name option by default.
grep.fallbackToNoIndex
If set to true, fall back to git grep --no-index if git grep is executed outside of a git repository. Defaults to false.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-gui(1)

NAME

git-gui - A portable graphical interface to Git

SYNOPSIS

git gui [<command>] [<arguments>]

DESCRIPTION

A Tcl/Tk based graphical user interface to Git. git gui focuses on allowing users to make changes to their repository by making new commits, amending existing ones, creating branches, performing local merges, and fetching/pushing to remote repositories.

Unlike gitk, git gui focuses on commit generation and single file annotation and does not show project history. It does however supply menu actions to start a gitk session from within git gui.

git gui is known to work on all popular UNIX systems, Mac OS X, and Windows (under both Cygwin and MSYS). To the extent possible OS specific user interface guidelines are followed, making git gui a fairly native interface for users.

COMMANDS

blame
Start a blame viewer on the specified file on the given version (or working directory if not specified).
browser
Start a tree browser showing all files in the specified commit. Files selected through the browser are opened in the blame viewer.
citool
Start git gui and arrange to make exactly one commit before exiting and returning to the shell. The interface is limited to only commit actions, slightly reducing the application's startup time and simplifying the menubar.
version
Display the currently running version of git gui.

Examples

git gui blame Makefile
Show the contents of the file Makefile in the current working directory, and provide annotations for both the original author of each line, and who moved the line to its current location. The uncommitted file is annotated, and uncommitted changes (if any) are explicitly attributed to Not Yet Committed.
git gui blame v0.99.8 Makefile
Show the contents of Makefile in revision v0.99.8 and provide annotations for each line. Unlike the above example the file is read from the object database and not the working directory.
git gui blame --line=100 Makefile
Loads annotations as described above and automatically scrolls the view to center on line 100.
git gui citool
Make one commit and return to the shell when it is complete. This command returns a non-zero exit code if the window was closed in any way other than by making a commit.
git gui citool --amend
Automatically enter the Amend Last Commit mode of the interface.
git gui citool --nocommit
Behave as normal citool, but instead of making a commit simply terminate with a zero exit code. It still checks that the index does not contain any unmerged entries, so you can use it as a GUI version of the section called “git-mergetool(1)”
git citool
Same as git gui citool (above).
git gui browser maint
Show a browser for the tree of the maint branch. Files selected in the browser can be viewed with the internal blame viewer.

SEE ALSO

the section called “gitk(1)”
The Git repository browser. Shows branches, commit history and file differences. gitk is the utility started by git gui's Repository Visualize actions.

Other

git gui is actually maintained as an independent project, but stable versions are distributed as part of the Git suite for the convenience of end users.

The official repository of the git gui project can be found at:

https://github.com/j6t/git-gui

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-hash-object(1)

NAME

git-hash-object - Compute object ID and optionally create an object from a file

SYNOPSIS

git hash-object [-t <type>] [-w] [--path=<file> | --no-filters]
                [--stdin [--literally]] [--] <file>…
git hash-object [-t <type>] [-w] --stdin-paths [--no-filters]

DESCRIPTION

Computes the object ID value for an object with specified type with the contents of the named file (which can be outside of the work tree), and optionally writes the resulting object into the object database. Reports its object ID to its standard output. When <type> is not specified, it defaults to "blob".

OPTIONS

-t <type>
Specify the type of object to be created (default: "blob"). Possible values are commit, tree, blob, and tag.
-w
Actually write the object into the object database.
--stdin
Read the object from standard input instead of from a file.
--stdin-paths
Read file names from the standard input, one per line, instead of from the command-line.
--path
Hash object as if it were located at the given path. The location of the file does not directly influence the hash value, but the path is used to determine which Git filters should be applied to the object before it can be placed in the object database. As a result of applying filters, the actual blob put into the object database may differ from the given file. This option is mainly useful for hashing temporary files located outside of the working directory or files read from stdin.
--no-filters
Hash the contents as is, ignoring any input filter that would have been chosen by the attributes mechanism, including the end-of-line conversion. If the file is read from standard input then this is always implied, unless the --path option is given.
--literally
Allow --stdin to hash any garbage into a loose object which might not otherwise pass standard object parsing or git-fsck checks. Useful for stress-testing Git itself or reproducing characteristics of corrupt or bogus objects encountered in the wild.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-help(1)

NAME

git-help - Display help information about Git

SYNOPSIS

git help [-a|--all] [--[no-]verbose] [--[no-]external-commands] [--[no-]aliases]
git help [[-i|--info] [-m|--man] [-w|--web]] [<command>|<doc>]
git help [-g|--guides]
git help [-c|--config]
git help [--user-interfaces]
git help [--developer-interfaces]

DESCRIPTION

With no options and no <command> or <doc> given, the synopsis of the git command and a list of the most commonly used Git commands are printed on the standard output.

If the option --all or -a is given, all available commands are printed on the standard output.

If the option --guides or -g is given, a list of the Git concept guides is also printed on the standard output.

If a command or other documentation is given, the relevant manual page will be brought up. The man program is used by default for this purpose, but this can be overridden by other options or configuration variables.

If an alias is given, git shows the definition of the alias on standard output. To get the manual page for the aliased command, use git <command> --help.

Note that git --help ... is identical to git help ... because the former is internally converted into the latter.

To display the the section called “git(1)” man page, use git help git.

This page can be displayed with git help help or git help --help.

OPTIONS

-a , --all
Print all the available commands on the standard output.
--no-external-commands
When used with --all, exclude the listing of external "git-*" commands found in the $PATH.
--no-aliases
When used with --all, exclude the listing of configured aliases.
--verbose
When used with --all, print description for all recognized commands. This is the default.
-c , --config
List all available configuration variables. This is a short summary of the list in the section called “git-config(1)”.
-g , --guides
Print a list of the Git concept guides on the standard output.
--user-interfaces

Print a list of the repository, command and file interfaces documentation on the standard output.

In-repository file interfaces such as .git/info/exclude are documented here (see the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”), as well as in-tree configuration such as .mailmap (see the section called “gitmailmap(5)”).

This section of the documentation also covers general or widespread user-interface conventions (e.g. the section called “gitcli(7)”), and pseudo-configuration such as the file-based .git/hooks/* interface described in the section called “githooks(5)”.

--developer-interfaces
Print a list of file formats, protocols and other developer interfaces documentation on the standard output.
-i , --info
Display manual page for the command in the info format. The info program will be used for that purpose.
-m , --man

Display manual page for the command in the man format. This option may be used to override a value set in the help.format configuration variable.

By default the man program will be used to display the manual page, but the man.viewer configuration variable may be used to choose other display programs (see below).

-w , --web

Display manual page for the command in the web (HTML) format. A web browser will be used for that purpose.

The web browser can be specified using the configuration variable help.browser, or web.browser if the former is not set. If neither of these config variables is set, the git web--browse helper script (called by git help) will pick a suitable default. See the section called “git-web--browse(1)” for more information about this.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

help.format

If no command-line option is passed, the help.format configuration variable will be checked. The following values are supported for this variable; they make git help behave as their corresponding command- line option:

  • "man" corresponds to -m|--man,
  • "info" corresponds to -i|--info,
  • "web" or "html" correspond to -w|--web.

help.browser, web.browser, and browser.<tool>.path

The help.browser, web.browser and browser.<tool>.path will also be checked if the web format is chosen (either by command-line option or configuration variable). See -w|--web in the OPTIONS section above and the section called “git-web--browse(1)”.

man.viewer

The man.viewer configuration variable will be checked if the man format is chosen. The following values are currently supported:

  • "man": use the man program as usual,
  • "woman": use emacsclient to launch the "woman" mode in emacs (this only works starting with emacsclient versions 22),
  • "konqueror": use kfmclient to open the man page in a new konqueror tab (see Note about konqueror below).

Values for other tools can be used if there is a corresponding man.<tool>.cmd configuration entry (see below).

Multiple values may be given to the man.viewer configuration variable. Their corresponding programs will be tried in the order listed in the configuration file.

For example, this configuration:

        [man]
                viewer = konqueror
                viewer = woman

will try to use konqueror first. But this may fail (for example, if DISPLAY is not set) and in that case emacs' woman mode will be tried.

If everything fails, or if no viewer is configured, the viewer specified in the GIT_MAN_VIEWER environment variable will be tried. If that fails too, the man program will be tried anyway.

man.<tool>.path

You can explicitly provide a full path to your preferred man viewer by setting the configuration variable man.<tool>.path. For example, you can configure the absolute path to konqueror by setting man.konqueror.path. Otherwise, git help assumes the tool is available in PATH.

man.<tool>.cmd

When the man viewer, specified by the man.viewer configuration variables, is not among the supported ones, then the corresponding man.<tool>.cmd configuration variable will be looked up. If this variable exists then the specified tool will be treated as a custom command and a shell eval will be used to run the command with the man page passed as arguments.

Note about konqueror

When konqueror is specified in the man.viewer configuration variable, we launch kfmclient to try to open the man page on an already opened konqueror in a new tab if possible.

For consistency, we also try such a trick if man.konqueror.path is set to something like A_PATH_TO/konqueror. That means we will try to launch A_PATH_TO/kfmclient instead.

If you really want to use konqueror, then you can use something like the following:

        [man]
                viewer = konq

        [man "konq"]
                cmd = A_PATH_TO/konqueror

Note about git config --global

Note that all these configuration variables should probably be set using the --global flag, for example like this:

$ git config --global help.format web
$ git config --global web.browser firefox

as they are probably more user specific than repository specific. See the section called “git-config(1)” for more information about this.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-hook(1)

NAME

git-hook - Run git hooks

SYNOPSIS

git hook run [--ignore-missing] [--to-stdin=<path>] <hook-name> [-- <hook-args>]

DESCRIPTION

A command interface for running git hooks (see the section called “githooks(5)”), for use by other scripted git commands.

SUBCOMMANDS

run

Run the <hook-name> hook. See the section called “githooks(5)” for supported hook names.

Any positional arguments to the hook should be passed after a mandatory -- (or --end-of-options, see the section called “gitcli(7)”). See the section called “githooks(5)” for arguments hooks might expect (if any).

OPTIONS

--to-stdin
For "run"; specify a file which will be streamed into the hook's stdin. The hook will receive the entire file from beginning to EOF.
--ignore-missing
Ignore any missing hook by quietly returning zero. Used for tools that want to do a blind one-shot run of a hook that may or may not be present.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-http-backend(1)

NAME

git-http-backend - Server side implementation of Git over HTTP

SYNOPSIS

git http-backend

DESCRIPTION

A simple CGI program to serve the contents of a Git repository to Git clients accessing the repository over http:// and https:// protocols. The program supports clients fetching using both the smart HTTP protocol and the backwards-compatible dumb HTTP protocol, as well as clients pushing using the smart HTTP protocol. It also supports Git's more-efficient "v2" protocol if properly configured; see the discussion of GIT_PROTOCOL in the ENVIRONMENT section below.

It verifies that the directory has the magic file "git-daemon-export-ok", and it will refuse to export any Git directory that hasn't explicitly been marked for export this way (unless the GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL environment variable is set).

By default, only the upload-pack service is enabled, which serves git fetch-pack and git ls-remote clients, which are invoked from git fetch, git pull, and git clone. If the client is authenticated, the receive-pack service is enabled, which serves git send-pack clients, which is invoked from git push.

SERVICES

These services can be enabled/disabled using the per-repository configuration file:

http.getanyfile
This serves Git clients older than version 1.6.6 that are unable to use the upload pack service. When enabled, clients are able to read any file within the repository, including objects that are no longer reachable from a branch but are still present. It is enabled by default, but a repository can disable it by setting this configuration value to false.
http.uploadpack
This serves git fetch-pack and git ls-remote clients. It is enabled by default, but a repository can disable it by setting this configuration value to false.
http.receivepack
This serves git send-pack clients, allowing push. It is disabled by default for anonymous users, and enabled by default for users authenticated by the web server. It can be disabled by setting this item to false, or enabled for all users, including anonymous users, by setting it to true.
http.uploadarchive
This serves git archive clients for remote archive over HTTP/HTTPS protocols. It is disabled by default. It only works in protocol v2.

URL TRANSLATION

To determine the location of the repository on disk, git http-backend concatenates the environment variables PATH_INFO, which is set automatically by the web server, and GIT_PROJECT_ROOT, which must be set manually in the web server configuration. If GIT_PROJECT_ROOT is not set, git http-backend reads PATH_TRANSLATED, which is also set automatically by the web server.

EXAMPLES

All of the following examples map http://$hostname/git/foo/bar.git to /var/www/git/foo/bar.git.

Apache 2.x

Ensure mod_cgi, mod_alias, and mod_env are enabled, set GIT_PROJECT_ROOT (or DocumentRoot) appropriately, and create a ScriptAlias to the CGI:

SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /var/www/git
SetEnv GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL
ScriptAlias /git/ /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/

# This is not strictly necessary using Apache and a modern version of
# git-http-backend, as the webserver will pass along the header in the
# environment as HTTP_GIT_PROTOCOL, and http-backend will copy that into
# GIT_PROTOCOL. But you may need this line (or something similar if you
# are using a different webserver), or if you want to support older Git
# versions that did not do that copying.
#
# Having the webserver set up GIT_PROTOCOL is perfectly fine even with
# modern versions (and will take precedence over HTTP_GIT_PROTOCOL,
# which means it can be used to override the client's request).
SetEnvIf Git-Protocol ".*" GIT_PROTOCOL=$0

To enable anonymous read access but authenticated write access, require authorization for both the initial ref advertisement (which we detect as a push via the service parameter in the query string), and the receive-pack invocation itself:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} service=git-receive-pack [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /git-receive-pack$
RewriteRule ^/git/ - [E=AUTHREQUIRED:yes]

<LocationMatch "^/git/">
        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from env=AUTHREQUIRED

        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Git Access"
        Require group committers
        Satisfy Any
        ...
</LocationMatch>

If you do not have mod_rewrite available to match against the query string, it is sufficient to just protect git-receive-pack itself, like:

<LocationMatch "^/git/.*/git-receive-pack$">
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Git Access"
        Require group committers
        ...
</LocationMatch>

In this mode, the server will not request authentication until the client actually starts the object negotiation phase of the push, rather than during the initial contact. For this reason, you must also enable the http.receivepack config option in any repositories that should accept a push. The default behavior, if http.receivepack is not set, is to reject any pushes by unauthenticated users; the initial request will therefore report 403 Forbidden to the client, without even giving an opportunity for authentication.

To require authentication for both reads and writes, use a Location directive around the repository, or one of its parent directories:

<Location /git/private>
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Private Git Access"
        Require group committers
        ...
</Location>

To serve gitweb at the same url, use a ScriptAliasMatch to only those URLs that git http-backend can handle, and forward the rest to gitweb:

ScriptAliasMatch \
        "(?x)^/git/(.*/(HEAD | \
                        info/refs | \
                        objects/(info/[^/]+ | \
                                 [0-9a-f]{2}/[0-9a-f]{38} | \
                                 pack/pack-[0-9a-f]{40}\.(pack|idx)) | \
                        git-(upload|receive)-pack))$" \
        /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/$1

ScriptAlias /git/ /var/www/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/

To serve multiple repositories from different the section called “gitnamespaces(7)” in a single repository:

SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/git/([^/]*)" GIT_NAMESPACE=$1
ScriptAliasMatch ^/git/[^/]*(.*) /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/storage.git$1
Accelerated static Apache 2.x

Similar to the above, but Apache can be used to return static files that are stored on disk. On many systems this may be more efficient as Apache can ask the kernel to copy the file contents from the file system directly to the network:

SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /var/www/git

AliasMatch ^/git/(.*/objects/[0-9a-f]{2}/[0-9a-f]{38})$          /var/www/git/$1
AliasMatch ^/git/(.*/objects/pack/pack-[0-9a-f]{40}.(pack|idx))$ /var/www/git/$1
ScriptAlias /git/ /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/

This can be combined with the gitweb configuration:

SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /var/www/git

AliasMatch ^/git/(.*/objects/[0-9a-f]{2}/[0-9a-f]{38})$          /var/www/git/$1
AliasMatch ^/git/(.*/objects/pack/pack-[0-9a-f]{40}.(pack|idx))$ /var/www/git/$1
ScriptAliasMatch \
        "(?x)^/git/(.*/(HEAD | \
                        info/refs | \
                        objects/info/[^/]+ | \
                        git-(upload|receive)-pack))$" \
        /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/$1
ScriptAlias /git/ /var/www/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/
Lighttpd

Ensure that mod_cgi, mod_alias, mod_auth, mod_setenv are loaded, then set GIT_PROJECT_ROOT appropriately and redirect all requests to the CGI:

alias.url += ( "/git" => "/usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend" )
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/git" {
        cgi.assign = ("" => "")
        setenv.add-environment = (
                "GIT_PROJECT_ROOT" => "/var/www/git",
                "GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL" => ""
        )
}

To enable anonymous read access but authenticated write access:

$HTTP["querystring"] =~ "service=git-receive-pack" {
        include "git-auth.conf"
}
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/git/.*/git-receive-pack$" {
        include "git-auth.conf"
}

where git-auth.conf looks something like:

auth.require = (
        "/" => (
                "method" => "basic",
                "realm" => "Git Access",
                "require" => "valid-user"
               )
)
# ...and set up auth.backend here

To require authentication for both reads and writes:

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/git/private" {
        include "git-auth.conf"
}

ENVIRONMENT

git http-backend relies upon the CGI environment variables set by the invoking web server, including:

  • PATH_INFO (if GIT_PROJECT_ROOT is set, otherwise PATH_TRANSLATED)
  • REMOTE_USER
  • REMOTE_ADDR
  • CONTENT_TYPE
  • QUERY_STRING
  • REQUEST_METHOD

The GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL environment variable may be passed to git-http-backend to bypass the check for the "git-daemon-export-ok" file in each repository before allowing export of that repository.

The GIT_HTTP_MAX_REQUEST_BUFFER environment variable (or the http.maxRequestBuffer config option) may be set to change the largest ref negotiation request that git will handle during a fetch; any fetch requiring a larger buffer will not succeed. This value should not normally need to be changed, but may be helpful if you are fetching from a repository with an extremely large number of refs. The value can be specified with a unit (e.g., 100M for 100 megabytes). The default is 10 megabytes.

Clients may probe for optional protocol capabilities (like the v2 protocol) using the Git-Protocol HTTP header. In order to support these, the contents of that header must appear in the GIT_PROTOCOL environment variable. Most webservers will pass this header to the CGI via the HTTP_GIT_PROTOCOL variable, and git-http-backend will automatically copy that to GIT_PROTOCOL. However, some webservers may be more selective about which headers they'll pass, in which case they need to be configured explicitly (see the mention of Git-Protocol in the Apache config from the earlier EXAMPLES section).

The backend process sets GIT_COMMITTER_NAME to $REMOTE_USER and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL to ${REMOTE_USER}@http.${REMOTE_ADDR}, ensuring that any reflogs created by git-receive-pack contain some identifying information of the remote user who performed the push.

All CGI environment variables are available to each of the hooks invoked by the git-receive-pack.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-http-fetch(1)

NAME

git-http-fetch - Download from a remote Git repository via HTTP

SYNOPSIS

git http-fetch [-c] [-t] [-a] [-d] [-v] [-w <filename>] [--recover] [--stdin | --packfile=<hash> | <commit>] <URL>

DESCRIPTION

Downloads a remote Git repository via HTTP.

This command always gets all objects. Historically, there were three options -a, -c and -t for choosing which objects to download. They are now silently ignored.

OPTIONS

commit-id
Either the hash or the filename under [URL]/refs/ to pull.
-a, -c, -t
These options are ignored for historical reasons.
-v
Report what is downloaded.
-w <filename>
Writes the commit-id into the specified filename under $GIT_DIR/refs/<filename> on the local end after the transfer is complete.
--stdin

Instead of a commit id on the command line (which is not expected in this case), git http-fetch expects lines on stdin in the format

<commit-id>['\t'<filename-as-in--w>]
--packfile=<hash>
For internal use only. Instead of a commit id on the command line (which is not expected in this case), git http-fetch fetches the packfile directly at the given URL and uses index-pack to generate corresponding .idx and .keep files. The hash is used to determine the name of the temporary file and is arbitrary. The output of index-pack is printed to stdout. Requires --index-pack-args.
--index-pack-args=<args>
For internal use only. The command to run on the contents of the downloaded pack. Arguments are URL-encoded separated by spaces.
--recover
Verify that everything reachable from target is fetched. Used after an earlier fetch is interrupted.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-http-push(1)

NAME

git-http-push - Push objects over HTTP/DAV to another repository

SYNOPSIS

git http-push [--all] [--dry-run] [--force] [--verbose] <URL> <ref> [<ref>…]

DESCRIPTION

Sends missing objects to the remote repository, and updates the remote branch.

NOTE: This command is temporarily disabled if your libcurl is older than 7.16, as the combination has been reported not to work and sometimes corrupts the repository.

OPTIONS

--all
Do not assume that the remote repository is complete in its current state, and verify all objects in the entire local ref's history exist in the remote repository.
--force
Usually, the command refuses to update a remote ref that is not an ancestor of the local ref used to overwrite it. This flag disables the check. What this means is that the remote repository can lose commits; use it with care.
--dry-run
Do everything except actually send the updates.
--verbose
Report the list of objects being walked locally and the list of objects successfully sent to the remote repository.
-d , -D

Remove <ref> from remote repository. The specified branch cannot be the remote HEAD. If -d is specified, the following other conditions must also be met:

  • Remote HEAD must resolve to an object that exists locally
  • Specified branch resolves to an object that exists locally
  • Specified branch is an ancestor of the remote HEAD
<ref>…
The remote refs to update.

SPECIFYING THE REFS

A <ref> specification can be either a single pattern, or a pair of such patterns separated by a colon ":" (this means that a ref name cannot have a colon in it). A single pattern <name> is just a shorthand for <name>:<name>.

Each pattern pair <src>:<dst> consists of the source side (before the colon) and the destination side (after the colon). The ref to be pushed is determined by finding a match that matches the source side, and where it is pushed is determined by using the destination side.

  • It is an error if <src> does not match exactly one of the local refs.
  • If <dst> does not match any remote ref, either

    • it has to start with "refs/"; <dst> is used as the destination literally in this case.
    • <src> == <dst> and the ref that matched the <src> must not exist in the set of remote refs; the ref matched <src> locally is used as the name of the destination.

Without --force`, the <src> ref is stored at the remote only if <dst> does not exist, or <dst> is a proper subset (i.e. an ancestor) of <src>. This check, known as "fast-forward check", is performed to avoid accidentally overwriting the remote ref and losing other peoples commits from there.

With --force, the fast-forward check is disabled for all refs.

Optionally, a <ref> parameter can be prefixed with a plus + sign to disable the fast-forward check only on that ref.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-imap-send(1)

NAME

git-imap-send - Send a collection of patches from stdin to an IMAP folder

SYNOPSIS

git imap-send [-v] [-q] [--[no-]curl]

DESCRIPTION

This command uploads a mailbox generated with git format-patch into an IMAP drafts folder. This allows patches to be sent as other email is when using mail clients that cannot read mailbox files directly. The command also works with any general mailbox in which emails have the fields "From", "Date", and "Subject" in that order.

Typical usage is something like:

git format-patch --signoff --stdout --attach origin | git imap-send

OPTIONS

-v , --verbose
Be verbose.
-q , --quiet
Be quiet.
--curl
Use libcurl to communicate with the IMAP server, unless tunneling into it. Ignored if Git was built without the USE_CURL_FOR_IMAP_SEND option set.
--no-curl
Talk to the IMAP server using git's own IMAP routines instead of using libcurl. Ignored if Git was built with the NO_OPENSSL option set.

CONFIGURATION

To use the tool, imap.folder and either imap.tunnel or imap.host must be set to appropriate values.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

imap.folder
The folder to drop the mails into, which is typically the Drafts folder. For example: "INBOX.Drafts", "INBOX/Drafts" or "[Gmail]/Drafts". Required.
imap.tunnel
Command used to set up a tunnel to the IMAP server through which commands will be piped instead of using a direct network connection to the server. Required when imap.host is not set.
imap.host
A URL identifying the server. Use an imap:// prefix for non-secure connections and an imaps:// prefix for secure connections. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set, but required otherwise.
imap.user
The username to use when logging in to the server.
imap.pass
The password to use when logging in to the server.
imap.port
An integer port number to connect to on the server. Defaults to 143 for imap:// hosts and 993 for imaps:// hosts. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set.
imap.sslverify
A boolean to enable/disable verification of the server certificate used by the SSL/TLS connection. Default is true. Ignored when imap.tunnel is set.
imap.preformattedHTML
A boolean to enable/disable the use of html encoding when sending a patch. An html encoded patch will be bracketed with <pre> and have a content type of text/html. Ironically, enabling this option causes Thunderbird to send the patch as a plain/text, format=fixed email. Default is false.
imap.authMethod
Specify the authentication method for authenticating with the IMAP server. If Git was built with the NO_CURL option, or if your curl version is older than 7.34.0, or if you're running git-imap-send with the --no-curl option, the only supported method is CRAM-MD5. If this is not set then git imap-send uses the basic IMAP plaintext LOGIN command.

EXAMPLES

Using tunnel mode:

[imap]
    folder = "INBOX.Drafts"
    tunnel = "ssh -q -C user@example.com /usr/bin/imapd ./Maildir 2> /dev/null"

Using direct mode:

[imap]
    folder = "INBOX.Drafts"
    host = imap://imap.example.com
    user = bob
    pass = p4ssw0rd

Using direct mode with SSL:

[imap]
    folder = "INBOX.Drafts"
    host = imaps://imap.example.com
    user = bob
    pass = p4ssw0rd
    port = 123
    ; sslVerify = false

Note

You may want to use sslVerify=false while troubleshooting, if you suspect that the reason you are having trouble connecting is because the certificate you use at the private server example.com you are trying to set up (or have set up) may not be verified correctly.

Using Gmail's IMAP interface:

[imap]
        folder = "[Gmail]/Drafts"
        host = imaps://imap.gmail.com
        user = user@gmail.com
        port = 993

Note

You might need to instead use: folder = "[Google Mail]/Drafts" if you get an error that the "Folder doesn't exist".

Note

If your Gmail account is set to another language than English, the name of the "Drafts" folder will be localized.

Once the commits are ready to be sent, run the following command:

$ git format-patch --cover-letter -M --stdout origin/master | git imap-send

Just make sure to disable line wrapping in the email client (Gmail's web interface will wrap lines no matter what, so you need to use a real IMAP client).

CAUTION

It is still your responsibility to make sure that the email message sent by your email program meets the standards of your project. Many projects do not like patches to be attached. Some mail agents will transform patches (e.g. wrap lines, send them as format=flowed) in ways that make them fail. You will get angry flames ridiculing you if you don't check this.

Thunderbird in particular is known to be problematic. Thunderbird users may wish to visit this web page for more information: https://kb.mozillazine.org/Plain_text_e-mail_-_Thunderbird#Completely_plain_email

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-index-pack(1)

NAME

git-index-pack - Build pack index file for an existing packed archive

SYNOPSIS

git index-pack [-v] [-o <index-file>] [--[no-]rev-index] <pack-file>
git index-pack --stdin [--fix-thin] [--keep] [-v] [-o <index-file>]
                  [--[no-]rev-index] [<pack-file>]

DESCRIPTION

Reads a packed archive (.pack) from the specified file, builds a pack index file (.idx) for it, and optionally writes a reverse-index (.rev) for the specified pack. The packed archive, together with the pack index, can then be placed in the objects/pack/ directory of a Git repository.

OPTIONS

-v
Be verbose about what is going on, including progress status.
-o <index-file>
Write the generated pack index into the specified file. Without this option the name of pack index file is constructed from the name of packed archive file by replacing .pack with .idx (and the program fails if the name of packed archive does not end with .pack).
--[no-]rev-index
When this flag is provided, generate a reverse index (a .rev file) corresponding to the given pack. If --verify is given, ensure that the existing reverse index is correct. Takes precedence over pack.writeReverseIndex.
--stdin
When this flag is provided, the pack is read from stdin instead and a copy is then written to <pack-file>. If <pack-file> is not specified, the pack is written to objects/pack/ directory of the current Git repository with a default name determined from the pack content. If <pack-file> is not specified consider using --keep to prevent a race condition between this process and git repack.
--fix-thin
Fix a "thin" pack produced by git pack-objects --thin (see the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” for details) by adding the excluded objects the deltified objects are based on to the pack. This option only makes sense in conjunction with --stdin.
--keep
Before moving the index into its final destination create an empty .keep file for the associated pack file. This option is usually necessary with --stdin to prevent a simultaneous git repack process from deleting the newly constructed pack and index before refs can be updated to use objects contained in the pack.
--keep=<msg>
Like --keep, create a .keep file before moving the index into its final destination. However, instead of creating an empty file place <msg> followed by an LF into the .keep file. The <msg> message can later be searched for within all .keep files to locate any which have outlived their usefulness.
--index-version=<version>[,<offset>]
This is intended to be used by the test suite only. It allows to force the version for the generated pack index, and to force 64-bit index entries on objects located above the given offset.
--strict[=<msg-id>=<severity>…]
Die, if the pack contains broken objects or links. An optional comma-separated list of <msg-id>=<severity> can be passed to change the severity of some possible issues, e.g., --strict="missingEmail=ignore,badTagName=error". See the entry for the fsck.<msg-id> configuration options in the section called “git-fsck(1)” for more information on the possible values of <msg-id> and <severity>.
--progress-title

For internal use only.

Set the title of the progress bar. The title is "Receiving objects" by default and "Indexing objects" when --stdin is specified.

--check-self-contained-and-connected
Die if the pack contains broken links. For internal use only.
--fsck-objects[=<msg-id>=<severity>…]

Die if the pack contains broken objects, but unlike --strict, don't choke on broken links. If the pack contains a tree pointing to a .gitmodules blob that does not exist, prints the hash of that blob (for the caller to check) after the hash that goes into the name of the pack/idx file (see "Notes").

An optional comma-separated list of <msg-id>=<severity> can be passed to change the severity of some possible issues, e.g., --fsck-objects="missingEmail=ignore,badTagName=ignore". See the entry for the fsck.<msg-id> configuration options in the section called “git-fsck(1)” for more information on the possible values of <msg-id> and <severity>.

--threads=<n>
Specifies the number of threads to spawn when resolving deltas. This requires that index-pack be compiled with pthreads otherwise this option is ignored with a warning. This is meant to reduce packing time on multiprocessor machines. The required amount of memory for the delta search window is however multiplied by the number of threads. Specifying 0 will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPU's and use maximum 3 threads.
--max-input-size=<size>
Die, if the pack is larger than <size>.
--object-format=<hash-algorithm>

Specify the given object format (hash algorithm) for the pack. The valid values are sha1 and (if enabled) sha256. The default is the algorithm for the current repository (set by extensions.objectFormat), or sha1 if no value is set or outside a repository.

This option cannot be used with --stdin.

Note: At present, there is no interoperability between SHA-256 repositories and SHA-1 repositories.

Historically, we warned that SHA-256 repositories may later need backward incompatible changes when we introduce such interoperability features. Today, we only expect compatible changes. Furthermore, if such changes prove to be necessary, it can be expected that SHA-256 repositories created with today's Git will be usable by future versions of Git without data loss.

--promisor[=<message>]

Before committing the pack-index, create a .promisor file for this pack. Particularly helpful when writing a promisor pack with --fix-thin since the name of the pack is not final until the pack has been fully written. If a <message> is provided, then that content will be written to the .promisor file for future reference. See partial clone for more information.

Also, if there are objects in the given pack that references non-promisor objects (in the repo), repacks those non-promisor objects into a promisor pack. This avoids a situation in which a repo has non-promisor objects that are accessible through promisor objects.

Requires <pack-file> to not be specified.

NOTES

Once the index has been created, the hash that goes into the name of the pack/idx file is printed to stdout. If --stdin was also used then this is prefixed by either "pack\t", or "keep\t" if a new .keep file was successfully created. This is useful to remove a .keep file used as a lock to prevent the race with git repack mentioned above.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-init-db(1)

NAME

git-init-db - Creates an empty Git repository

SYNOPSIS

git init-db [-q | --quiet] [--bare] [--template=<template-directory>] [--separate-git-dir <git-dir>] [--shared[=<permissions>]]

DESCRIPTION

This is a synonym for the section called “git-init(1)”. Please refer to the documentation of that command.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-init(1)

NAME

git-init - Create an empty Git repository or reinitialize an existing one

SYNOPSIS

git init [-q | --quiet] [--bare] [--template=<template-directory>]
         [--separate-git-dir <git-dir>] [--object-format=<format>]
         [--ref-format=<format>]
         [-b <branch-name> | --initial-branch=<branch-name>]
         [--shared[=<permissions>]] [<directory>]

DESCRIPTION

This command creates an empty Git repository - basically a .git directory with subdirectories for objects, refs/heads, refs/tags, and template files. An initial branch without any commits will be created (see the --initial-branch option below for its name).

If the GIT_DIR environment variable is set then it specifies a path to use instead of ./.git for the base of the repository.

If the object storage directory is specified via the GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY environment variable then the sha1 directories are created underneath; otherwise, the default $GIT_DIR/objects directory is used.

Running git init in an existing repository is safe. It will not overwrite things that are already there. The primary reason for rerunning git init is to pick up newly added templates (or to move the repository to another place if --separate-git-dir is given).

OPTIONS

-q , --quiet
Only print error and warning messages; all other output will be suppressed.
--bare
Create a bare repository. If GIT_DIR environment is not set, it is set to the current working directory.
--object-format=<format>

Specify the given object <format> (hash algorithm) for the repository. The valid values are sha1 and (if enabled) sha256. sha1 is the default.

Note: At present, there is no interoperability between SHA-256 repositories and SHA-1 repositories.

Historically, we warned that SHA-256 repositories may later need backward incompatible changes when we introduce such interoperability features. Today, we only expect compatible changes. Furthermore, if such changes prove to be necessary, it can be expected that SHA-256 repositories created with today's Git will be usable by future versions of Git without data loss.

--ref-format=<format>

Specify the given ref storage <format> for the repository. The valid values are:

  • files for loose files with packed-refs. This is the default.
  • reftable for the reftable format. This format is experimental and its internals are subject to change.
--template=<template-directory>
Specify the directory from which templates will be used. (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section below.)
--separate-git-dir=<git-dir>

Instead of initializing the repository as a directory to either $GIT_DIR or ./.git/, create a text file there containing the path to the actual repository. This file acts as a filesystem-agnostic Git symbolic link to the repository.

If this is a reinitialization, the repository will be moved to the specified path.

-b <branch-name> , --initial-branch=<branch-name>
Use <branch-name> for the initial branch in the newly created repository. If not specified, fall back to the default name (currently master, but this is subject to change in the future; the name can be customized via the init.defaultBranch configuration variable).
--shared[=(false|true|umask|group|all|world|everybody|<perm>)]

Specify that the Git repository is to be shared amongst several users. This allows users belonging to the same group to push into that repository. When specified, the config variable core.sharedRepository is set so that files and directories under $GIT_DIR are created with the requested permissions. When not specified, Git will use permissions reported by umask(2).

The option can have the following values, defaulting to group if no value is given:

umask , false
Use permissions reported by umask(2). The default, when --shared is not specified.
group , true
Make the repository group-writable, (and g+sx, since the git group may not be the primary group of all users). This is used to loosen the permissions of an otherwise safe umask(2) value. Note that the umask still applies to the other permission bits (e.g. if umask is 0022, using group will not remove read privileges from other (non-group) users). See 0xxx for how to exactly specify the repository permissions.
all , world , everybody
Same as group, but make the repository readable by all users.
<perm>
<perm> is a 3-digit octal number prefixed with 0` and each file will have mode <perm>. <perm> will override users umask(2) value (and not only loosen permissions as group and all do). 0640 will create a repository which is group-readable, but not group-writable or accessible to others. 0660 will create a repo that is readable and writable to the current user and group, but inaccessible to others (directories and executable files get their x bit from the r bit for corresponding classes of users).

By default, the configuration flag receive.denyNonFastForwards is enabled in shared repositories, so that you cannot force a non fast-forwarding push into it.

If you provide a <directory>, the command is run inside it. If this directory does not exist, it will be created.

TEMPLATE DIRECTORY

Files and directories in the template directory whose name do not start with a dot will be copied to the $GIT_DIR after it is created.

The template directory will be one of the following (in order):

  • the argument given with the --template option;
  • the contents of the $GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR environment variable;
  • the init.templateDir configuration variable; or
  • the default template directory: /usr/share/git-core/templates.

The default template directory includes some directory structure, suggested "exclude patterns" (see the section called “gitignore(5)”), and sample hook files.

The sample hooks are all disabled by default. To enable one of the sample hooks rename it by removing its .sample suffix.

See the section called “githooks(5)” for more general info on hook execution.

EXAMPLES

Start a new Git repository for an existing code base
$ cd /path/to/my/codebase
$ git init      1
$ git add .     2
$ git commit    3

1

Create a /path/to/my/codebase/.git directory.

2

Add all existing files to the index.

3

Record the pristine state as the first commit in the history.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

init.templateDir
Specify the directory from which templates will be copied.
init.defaultBranch
Allows overriding the default branch name e.g. when initializing a new repository.
init.defaultObjectFormat
Allows overriding the default object format for new repositories. See --object-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_HASH environment variable take precedence over this config.
init.defaultRefFormat
Allows overriding the default ref storage format for new repositories. See --ref-format= in the section called “git-init(1)”. Both the command line option and the GIT_DEFAULT_REF_FORMAT environment variable take precedence over this config.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-instaweb(1)

NAME

git-instaweb - Instantly browse your working repository in gitweb

SYNOPSIS

git instaweb [--local] [--httpd=<httpd>] [--port=<port>]
               [--browser=<browser>]
git instaweb [--start] [--stop] [--restart]

DESCRIPTION

A simple script to set up gitweb and a web server for browsing the local repository.

OPTIONS

-l , --local
Only bind the web server to the local IP (127.0.0.1).
-d , --httpd
The HTTP daemon command-line that will be executed. Command-line options may be specified here, and the configuration file will be added at the end of the command-line. Currently apache2, lighttpd, mongoose, plackup, python and webrick are supported. (Default: lighttpd)
-m , --module-path
The module path (only needed if httpd is Apache). (Default: /usr/lib/apache2/modules)
-p , --port
The port number to bind the httpd to. (Default: 1234)
-b , --browser
The web browser that should be used to view the gitweb page. This will be passed to the git web--browse helper script along with the URL of the gitweb instance. See the section called “git-web--browse(1)” for more information about this. If the script fails, the URL will be printed to stdout.
start , --start
Start the httpd instance and exit. Regenerate configuration files as necessary for spawning a new instance.
stop , --stop
Stop the httpd instance and exit. This does not generate any of the configuration files for spawning a new instance, nor does it close the browser.
restart , --restart
Restart the httpd instance and exit. Regenerate configuration files as necessary for spawning a new instance.

CONFIGURATION

You may specify configuration in your .git/config

[instaweb]
        local = true
        httpd = apache2 -f
        port = 4321
        browser = konqueror
        modulePath = /usr/lib/apache2/modules

If the configuration variable instaweb.browser is not set, web.browser will be used instead if it is defined. See the section called “git-web--browse(1)” for more information about this.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-interpret-trailers(1)

NAME

git-interpret-trailers - Add or parse structured information in commit messages

SYNOPSIS

git interpret-trailers [--in-place] [--trim-empty]
                        [(--trailer (<key>|<key-alias>)[(=|:)<value>])…]
                        [--parse] [<file>…]

DESCRIPTION

Add or parse trailer lines that look similar to RFC 822 e-mail headers, at the end of the otherwise free-form part of a commit message. For example, in the following commit message

subject

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Signed-off-by: Alice <alice@example.com>
Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>

the last two lines starting with "Signed-off-by" are trailers.

This command reads commit messages from either the <file> arguments or the standard input if no <file> is specified. If --parse is specified, the output consists of the parsed trailers coming from the input, without influencing them with any command line options or configuration variables.

Otherwise, this command applies trailer.* configuration variables (which could potentially add new trailers, as well as reposition them), as well as any command line arguments that can override configuration variables (such as --trailer=... which could also add new trailers), to each input file. The result is emitted on the standard output.

This command can also operate on the output of the section called “git-format-patch(1)”, which is more elaborate than a plain commit message. Namely, such output includes a commit message (as above), a "---" divider line, and a patch part. For these inputs, the divider and patch parts are not modified by this command and are emitted as is on the output, unless --no-divider is specified.

Some configuration variables control the way the --trailer arguments are applied to each input and the way any existing trailer in the input is changed. They also make it possible to automatically add some trailers.

By default, a <key>=<value> or <key>:<value> argument given using --trailer will be appended after the existing trailers only if the last trailer has a different (<key>, <value>) pair (or if there is no existing trailer). The <key> and <value> parts will be trimmed to remove starting and trailing whitespace, and the resulting trimmed <key> and <value> will appear in the output like this:

key: value

This means that the trimmed <key> and <value> will be separated by ': ' (one colon followed by one space).

For convenience, a <key-alias> can be configured to make using --trailer shorter to type on the command line. This can be configured using the trailer.<key-alias>.key configuration variable. The <keyAlias> must be a prefix of the full <key> string, although case sensitivity does not matter. For example, if you have

trailer.sign.key "Signed-off-by: "

in your configuration, you only need to specify --trailer="sign: foo" on the command line instead of --trailer="Signed-off-by: foo".

By default the new trailer will appear at the end of all the existing trailers. If there is no existing trailer, the new trailer will appear at the end of the input. A blank line will be added before the new trailer if there isn't one already.

Existing trailers are extracted from the input by looking for a group of one or more lines that (i) is all trailers, or (ii) contains at least one Git-generated or user-configured trailer and consists of at least 25% trailers. The group must be preceded by one or more empty (or whitespace-only) lines. The group must either be at the end of the input or be the last non-whitespace lines before a line that starts with --- (followed by a space or the end of the line).

When reading trailers, there can be no whitespace before or inside the <key>, but any number of regular space and tab characters are allowed between the <key> and the separator. There can be whitespaces before, inside or after the <value>. The <value> may be split over multiple lines with each subsequent line starting with at least one whitespace, like the "folding" in RFC 822. Example:

key: This is a very long value, with spaces and
  newlines in it.

Note that trailers do not follow (nor are they intended to follow) many of the rules for RFC 822 headers. For example they do not follow the encoding rule.

OPTIONS

--in-place
Edit the files in place.
--trim-empty
If the <value> part of any trailer contains only whitespace, the whole trailer will be removed from the output. This applies to existing trailers as well as new trailers.
--trailer <key>[(=|:)<value>]
Specify a (<key>, <value>) pair that should be applied as a trailer to the inputs. See the description of this command.
--where <placement> , --no-where
Specify where all new trailers will be added. A setting provided with --where overrides the trailer.where and any applicable trailer.<keyAlias>.where configuration variables and applies to all --trailer options until the next occurrence of --where or --no-where. Upon encountering --no-where, clear the effect of any previous use of --where, such that the relevant configuration variables are no longer overridden. Possible placements are after, before, end or start.
--if-exists <action> , --no-if-exists
Specify what action will be performed when there is already at least one trailer with the same <key> in the input. A setting provided with --if-exists overrides the trailer.ifExists and any applicable trailer.<keyAlias>.ifExists configuration variables and applies to all --trailer options until the next occurrence of --if-exists or --no-if-exists. Upon encountering '--no-if-exists, clear the effect of any previous use of '--if-exists, such that the relevant configuration variables are no longer overridden. Possible actions are addIfDifferent, addIfDifferentNeighbor, add, replace and doNothing.
--if-missing <action> , --no-if-missing
Specify what action will be performed when there is no other trailer with the same <key> in the input. A setting provided with --if-missing overrides the trailer.ifMissing and any applicable trailer.<keyAlias>.ifMissing configuration variables and applies to all --trailer options until the next occurrence of --if-missing or --no-if-missing. Upon encountering '--no-if-missing, clear the effect of any previous use of '--if-missing, such that the relevant configuration variables are no longer overridden. Possible actions are doNothing or add.
--only-trailers
Output only the trailers, not any other parts of the input.
--only-input
Output only trailers that exist in the input; do not add any from the command-line or by applying trailer.* configuration variables.
--unfold
If a trailer has a value that runs over multiple lines (aka "folded"), reformat the value into a single line.
--parse
A convenience alias for --only-trailers --only-input --unfold. This makes it easier to only see the trailers coming from the input without influencing them with any command line options or configuration variables, while also making the output machine-friendly with --unfold.
--no-divider
Do not treat --- as the end of the commit message. Use this when you know your input contains just the commit message itself (and not an email or the output of git format-patch).

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

trailer.separators

This option tells which characters are recognized as trailer separators. By default only : is recognized as a trailer separator, except that = is always accepted on the command line for compatibility with other git commands.

The first character given by this option will be the default character used when another separator is not specified in the config for this trailer.

For example, if the value for this option is "%=$", then only lines using the format <key><sep><value> with <sep> containing %, = or $ and then spaces will be considered trailers. And % will be the default separator used, so by default trailers will appear like: <key>% <value> (one percent sign and one space will appear between the key and the value).

trailer.where

This option tells where a new trailer will be added.

This can be end, which is the default, start, after or before.

If it is end, then each new trailer will appear at the end of the existing trailers.

If it is start, then each new trailer will appear at the start, instead of the end, of the existing trailers.

If it is after, then each new trailer will appear just after the last trailer with the same <key>.

If it is before, then each new trailer will appear just before the first trailer with the same <key>.

trailer.ifexists

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there is already at least one trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: addIfDifferentNeighbor (this is the default), addIfDifferent, add, replace or doNothing.

With addIfDifferentNeighbor, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is above or below the line where the new trailer will be added.

With addIfDifferent, a new trailer will be added only if no trailer with the same (<key>, <value>) pair is already in the input.

With add, a new trailer will be added, even if some trailers with the same (<key>, <value>) pair are already in the input.

With replace, an existing trailer with the same <key> will be deleted and the new trailer will be added. The deleted trailer will be the closest one (with the same <key>) to the place where the new one will be added.

With doNothing, nothing will be done; that is no new trailer will be added if there is already one with the same <key> in the input.

trailer.ifmissing

This option makes it possible to choose what action will be performed when there is not yet any trailer with the same <key> in the input.

The valid values for this option are: add (this is the default) and doNothing.

With add, a new trailer will be added.

With doNothing, nothing will be done.

trailer.<keyAlias>.key

Defines a <keyAlias> for the <key>. The <keyAlias> must be a prefix (case does not matter) of the <key>. For example, in git config trailer.ack.key "Acked-by" the "Acked-by" is the <key> and the "ack" is the <keyAlias>. This configuration allows the shorter --trailer "ack:..." invocation on the command line using the "ack" <keyAlias> instead of the longer --trailer "Acked-by:...".

At the end of the <key>, a separator can appear and then some space characters. By default the only valid separator is :, but this can be changed using the trailer.separators config variable.

If there is a separator in the key, then it overrides the default separator when adding the trailer.

trailer.<keyAlias>.where
This option takes the same values as the trailer.where configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.ifexists
This option takes the same values as the trailer.ifexists configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.ifmissing
This option takes the same values as the trailer.ifmissing configuration variable and it overrides what is specified by that option for trailers with the specified <keyAlias>.
trailer.<keyAlias>.command

Deprecated in favor of trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd. This option behaves in the same way as trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd, except that it doesn't pass anything as argument to the specified command. Instead the first occurrence of substring $ARG is replaced by the <value> that would be passed as argument.

Note that $ARG in the user's command is only replaced once and that the original way of replacing $ARG is not safe.

When both trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd and trailer.<keyAlias>.command are given for the same <keyAlias>, trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd is used and trailer.<keyAlias>.command is ignored.

trailer.<keyAlias>.cmd

This option can be used to specify a shell command that will be called once to automatically add a trailer with the specified <keyAlias>, and then called each time a --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument is specified to modify the <value> of the trailer that this option would produce.

When the specified command is first called to add a trailer with the specified <keyAlias>, the behavior is as if a special --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument was added at the beginning of the "git interpret-trailers" command, where <value> is taken to be the standard output of the command with any leading and trailing whitespace trimmed off.

If some --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> arguments are also passed on the command line, the command is called again once for each of these arguments with the same <keyAlias>. And the <value> part of these arguments, if any, will be passed to the command as its first argument. This way the command can produce a <value> computed from the <value> passed in the --trailer <keyAlias>=<value> argument.

EXAMPLES

  • Configure a sign trailer with a Signed-off-by key, and then add two of these trailers to a commit message file:

    $ git config trailer.sign.key "Signed-off-by"
    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer 'sign: Alice <alice@example.com>' --trailer 'sign: Bob <bob@example.com>' <msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Alice <alice@example.com>
    Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>
  • Use the --in-place option to edit a commit message file in place:

    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer 'Acked-by: Alice <alice@example.com>' --in-place msg.txt
    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>
    Acked-by: Alice <alice@example.com>
  • Extract the last commit as a patch, and add a Cc and a Reviewed-by trailer to it:

    $ git format-patch -1
    0001-foo.patch
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer 'Cc: Alice <alice@example.com>' --trailer 'Reviewed-by: Bob <bob@example.com>' 0001-foo.patch >0001-bar.patch
  • Configure a sign trailer with a command to automatically add a 'Signed-off-by: ' with the author information only if there is no 'Signed-off-by: ' already, and show how it works:

    $ cat msg1.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    $ git config trailer.sign.key "Signed-off-by: "
    $ git config trailer.sign.ifmissing add
    $ git config trailer.sign.ifexists doNothing
    $ git config trailer.sign.cmd 'echo "$(git config user.name) <$(git config user.email)>"'
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer sign <msg1.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>
    $ cat msg2.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Alice <alice@example.com>
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer sign <msg2.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Signed-off-by: Alice <alice@example.com>
  • Configure a fix trailer with a key that contains a # and no space after this character, and show how it works:

    $ git config trailer.separators ":#"
    $ git config trailer.fix.key "Fix #"
    $ echo "subject" | git interpret-trailers --trailer fix=42
    subject
    
    Fix #42
  • Configure a help trailer with a cmd use a script glog-find-author which search specified author identity from git log in git repository and show how it works:

    $ cat ~/bin/glog-find-author
    #!/bin/sh
    test -n "$1" && git log --author="$1" --pretty="%an <%ae>" -1 || true
    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    $ git config trailer.help.key "Helped-by: "
    $ git config trailer.help.ifExists "addIfDifferentNeighbor"
    $ git config trailer.help.cmd "~/bin/glog-find-author"
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer="help:Junio" --trailer="help:Couder" <msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    Helped-by: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
  • Configure a ref trailer with a cmd use a script glog-grep to grep last relevant commit from git log in the git repository and show how it works:

    $ cat ~/bin/glog-grep
    #!/bin/sh
    test -n "$1" && git log --grep "$1" --pretty=reference -1 || true
    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    $ git config trailer.ref.key "Reference-to: "
    $ git config trailer.ref.ifExists "replace"
    $ git config trailer.ref.cmd "~/bin/glog-grep"
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer="ref:Add copyright notices." <msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    Reference-to: 8bc9a0c769 (Add copyright notices., 2005-04-07)
  • Configure a see trailer with a command to show the subject of a commit that is related, and show how it works:

    $ cat msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    see: HEAD~2
    $ cat ~/bin/glog-ref
    #!/bin/sh
    git log -1 --oneline --format="%h (%s)" --abbrev-commit --abbrev=14
    $ git config trailer.see.key "See-also: "
    $ git config trailer.see.ifExists "replace"
    $ git config trailer.see.ifMissing "doNothing"
    $ git config trailer.see.cmd "glog-ref"
    $ git interpret-trailers --trailer=see <msg.txt
    subject
    
    body text
    
    See-also: fe3187489d69c4 (subject of related commit)
  • Configure a commit template with some trailers with empty values (using sed to show and keep the trailing spaces at the end of the trailers), then configure a commit-msg hook that uses git interpret-trailers to remove trailers with empty values and to add a git-version trailer:

    $ cat temp.txt
    ***subject***
    
    ***message***
    
    Fixes: Z
    Cc: Z
    Reviewed-by: Z
    Signed-off-by: Z
    $ sed -e 's/ Z$/ /' temp.txt > commit_template.txt
    $ git config commit.template commit_template.txt
    $ cat .git/hooks/commit-msg
    #!/bin/sh
    git interpret-trailers --trim-empty --trailer "git-version: \$(git describe)" "\$1" > "\$1.new"
    mv "\$1.new" "\$1"
    $ chmod +x .git/hooks/commit-msg

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-log(1)

NAME

git-log - Show commit logs

SYNOPSIS

git log [<options>] [<revision-range>] [[--] <path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Shows the commit logs.

List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s) given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse chronological order by default.

You can think of this as a set operation. Commits reachable from any of the commits given on the command line form a set, and then commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the command's output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used to further limit the result.

Thus, the following command:

$ git log foo bar ^baz

means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but not from baz".

A special notation "<commit1>..<commit2>" can be used as a short-hand for "^<commit1> <commit2>". For example, either of the following may be used interchangeably:

$ git log origin..HEAD
$ git log HEAD ^origin

Another special notation is "<commit1><commit2>" which is useful for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent:

$ git log A B --not $(git merge-base --all A B)
$ git log A...B

The command takes options applicable to the the section called “git-rev-list(1)” command to control what is shown and how, and options applicable to the the section called “git-diff(1)” command to control how the changes each commit introduces are shown.

OPTIONS

--follow
Continue listing the history of a file beyond renames (works only for a single file).
--no-decorate , --decorate[=short|full|auto|no]
Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. The option --decorate is short-hand for --decorate=short. Default to configuration value of log.decorate if configured, otherwise, auto.
--decorate-refs=<pattern> , --decorate-refs-exclude=<pattern>

For each candidate reference, do not use it for decoration if it matches any patterns given to --decorate-refs-exclude or if it doesn't match any of the patterns given to --decorate-refs. The log.excludeDecoration config option allows excluding refs from the decorations, but an explicit --decorate-refs pattern will override a match in log.excludeDecoration.

If none of these options or config settings are given, then references are used as decoration if they match HEAD, refs/heads/, refs/remotes/, refs/stash/, or refs/tags/.

--clear-decorations
When specified, this option clears all previous --decorate-refs or --decorate-refs-exclude options and relaxes the default decoration filter to include all references. This option is assumed if the config value log.initialDecorationSet is set to all.
--source
Print out the ref name given on the command line by which each commit was reached.
--[no-]mailmap , --[no-]use-mailmap
Use mailmap file to map author and committer names and email addresses to canonical real names and email addresses. See the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
--full-diff

Without this flag, git log -p <path>... shows commits that touch the specified paths, and diffs about the same specified paths. With this, the full diff is shown for commits that touch the specified paths; this means that "<path>…" limits only commits, and doesn't limit diff for those commits.

Note that this affects all diff-based output types, e.g. those produced by --stat, etc.

--log-size
Include a line log size <number> in the output for each commit, where <number> is the length of that commit's message in bytes. Intended to speed up tools that read log messages from git log output by allowing them to allocate space in advance.
-L<start>,<end>:<file> , -L:<funcname>:<file>

Trace the evolution of the line range given by <start>,<end>, or by the function name regex <funcname>, within the <file>. You may not give any pathspec limiters. This is currently limited to a walk starting from a single revision, i.e., you may only give zero or one positive revision arguments, and <start> and <end> (or <funcname>) must exist in the starting revision. You can specify this option more than once. Implies --patch. Patch output can be suppressed using --no-patch, but other diff formats (namely --raw, --numstat, --shortstat, --dirstat, --summary, --name-only, --name-status, --check) are not currently implemented.

<start> and <end> can take one of these forms:

  • number

    If <start> or <end> is a number, it specifies an absolute line number (lines count from 1).

  • /regex/

    This form will use the first line matching the given POSIX regex. If <start> is a regex, it will search from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. If <start> is ^/regex/, it will search from the start of file. If <end> is a regex, it will search starting at the line given by <start>.

  • +offset or -offset

    This is only valid for <end> and will specify a number of lines before or after the line given by <start>.

If :<funcname> is given in place of <start> and <end>, it is a regular expression that denotes the range from the first funcname line that matches <funcname>, up to the next funcname line. :<funcname> searches from the end of the previous -L range, if any, otherwise from the start of file. ^:<funcname> searches from the start of file. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see Defining a custom hunk-header in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

<revision-range>
Show only commits in the specified revision range. When no <revision-range> is specified, it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the whole history leading to the current commit). origin..HEAD specifies all the commits reachable from the current commit (i.e. HEAD), but not from origin. For a complete list of ways to spell <revision-range>, see the Specifying Ranges section of the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.
[--] <path>…

Show only commits that are enough to explain how the files that match the specified paths came to be. See History Simplification below for details and other simplification modes.

Paths may need to be prefixed with -- to separate them from options or the revision range, when confusion arises.

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

-<number> , -n <number> , --max-count=<number>
Limit the number of commits to output.
--skip=<number>
Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output.
--since=<date> , --after=<date>
Show commits more recent than a specific date.
--since-as-filter=<date>
Show all commits more recent than a specific date. This visits all commits in the range, rather than stopping at the first commit which is older than a specific date.
--until=<date> , --before=<date>
Show commits older than a specific date.
--author=<pattern> , --committer=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --author=<pattern>, commits whose author matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for multiple --committer=<pattern>).
--grep-reflog=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep-reflog, commits whose reflog message matches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is an error to use this option unless --walk-reflogs is in use.
--grep=<pattern>

Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep=<pattern>, commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).

When --notes is in effect, the message from the notes is matched as if it were part of the log message.

--all-match
Limit the commits output to ones that match all given --grep, instead of ones that match at least one.
--invert-grep
Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that do not match the pattern specified with --grep=<pattern>.
-i , --regexp-ignore-case
Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard to letter case.
--basic-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions; this is the default.
-E , --extended-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions instead of the default basic regular expressions.
-F , --fixed-strings
Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don't interpret pattern as a regular expression).
-P , --perl-regexp

Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--remove-empty
Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.
--merges
Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as --min-parents=2.
--no-merges
Do not print commits with more than one parent. This is exactly the same as --max-parents=1.
--min-parents=<number> , --max-parents=<number> , --no-min-parents , --no-max-parents

Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parent commits. In particular, --max-parents=1 is the same as --no-merges, --min-parents=2 is the same as --merges. --max-parents=0 gives all root commits and --min-parents=3 all octopus merges.

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

--first-parent

When finding commits to include, follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge.

This option also changes default diff format for merge commits to first-parent, see --diff-merges=first-parent for details.

--exclude-first-parent-only
When finding commits to exclude (with a ^), follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This can be used to find the set of changes in a topic branch from the point where it diverged from the remote branch, given that arbitrary merges can be valid topic branch changes.
--not
Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not. When used on the command line before --stdin, the revisions passed through stdin will not be affected by it. Conversely, when passed via standard input, the revisions passed on the command line will not be affected by it.
--all
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--branches[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--tags[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--remotes[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--glob=<glob-pattern>
Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern> are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/, is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--exclude=<glob-pattern>

Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]
Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch, git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with transfer.hideRefs (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This option affects the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared after processing them.
--reflog
Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--alternate-refs
Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternate repositories were listed on the command line. An alternate repository is any repository whose object directory is specified in objects/info/alternates. The set of included objects may be modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--single-worktree
By default, all working trees will be examined by the following options when there are more than one (see the section called “git-worktree(1)”): --all, --reflog and --indexed-objects. This option forces them to examine the current working tree only.
--ignore-missing
Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if the bad input was not given.
--bisect
Pretend as if the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad was listed and as if it was followed by --not and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* on the command line.
--stdin
In addition to getting arguments from the command line, read them from standard input as well. This accepts commits and pseudo-options like --all and --glob=. When a -- separator is seen, the following input is treated as paths and used to limit the result. Flags like --not which are read via standard input are only respected for arguments passed in the same way and will not influence any subsequent command line arguments.
--cherry-mark
Like --cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commits with = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.
--cherry-pick

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the other side when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, 3rd on b may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

--left-only , --right-only

List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric difference, i.e. only those which would be marked < resp. > by --left-right.

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

--cherry
A synonym for --right-only --cherry-mark --no-merges; useful to limit the output to the commits on our side and mark those that have been applied to the other side of a forked history with git log --cherry upstream...mybranch, similar to git cherry upstream mybranch.
-g , --walk-reflogs

Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones. When this option is used you cannot specify commits to exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2, and commit1...commit2 notations cannot be used).

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry), depending on a few rules:

  1. If the starting point is specified as ref@{<Nth>}, show the index format.
  2. If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show the timestamp format.
  3. If neither was used, but --date was given on the command line, show the timestamp in the format requested by --date.
  4. Otherwise, show the index format.

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also the section called “git-reflog(1)”.

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

--merge
Show commits touching conflicted paths in the range HEAD...<other>, where <other> is the first existing pseudoref in MERGE_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD or REBASE_HEAD. Only works when the index has unmerged entries. This option can be used to show relevant commits when resolving conflicts from a 3-way merge.
--boundary
Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits are prefixed with -.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

<paths>
Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.
--simplify-by-decoration
Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

Default mode
Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches with the same content)
--show-pulls
Include all commits from the default mode, but also any merge commits that are not TREESAME to the first parent but are TREESAME to a later parent. This mode is helpful for showing the merge commits that "first introduced" a change to a branch.
--full-history
Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.
--dense
Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history.
--sparse
All commits in the simplified history are shown.
--simplify-merges
Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.
--ancestry-path[=<commit>]
When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), and a commit <commit> in that range, only display commits in that range that are ancestors of <commit>, descendants of <commit>, or <commit> itself. If no commit is specified, use commit1 (the excluded part of the range) as <commit>. Can be passed multiple times; if so, a commit is included if it is any of the commits given or if it is an ancestor or descendant of one of them.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /   /
        I     B   C   D   E   Y
         \   /   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A---Q is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:

  • I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents asdf, and a file quux exists with contents quux. Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
  • In A, foo contains just foo.
  • B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents.
  • C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to foobar, so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • D sets foo to baz. Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to foobarbaz; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • E changes quux to xyzzy, and its merge P combines the strings to quux xyzzy. P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.
  • X is an independent root commit that added a new file side, and Y modified it. Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added side to P, and Q is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding commits based on whether --full-history and/or parent rewriting (via --parents or --children) are used. The following settings are available.

Default mode

Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see --sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents.

This results in:

          .-A---N---O
         /     /   /
        I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

--full-history without parent rewriting

This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them. Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get

        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

--full-history with parent rewriting

Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see --sparse below).

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /
        I     B   /   D   /
         \   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'

Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N, and X, Y and Q.

In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion:

--dense
Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent.
--sparse

All commits that are walked are included.

Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.

--simplify-merges

First, build a history graph in the same way that --full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

  • Set C' to C.
  • Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. In the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents or that are root commits TREESAME to an empty tree, and remove duplicates, but take care to never drop all parents that we are TREESAME to.
  • If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (has zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains. Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

          .-A---M---N---O
         /     /       /
        I     B       D
         \   /       /
          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

  • N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.
  • P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
  • Q's parent list had Y simplified to X. X was then removed, because it was a TREESAME root. Q was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.

There is another simplification mode available:

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

Limit the displayed commits to those which are an ancestor of <commit>, or which are a descendant of <commit>, or are <commit> itself.

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

            D---E-------F
           /     \       \
          B---C---G---H---I---J
         /                     \
        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that what does M have that did not exist in D. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

                E-------F
                 \       \
                  G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

                E
                 \
              C---G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                K---------------L--M

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file's simplified history. Let's demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `---Y--'

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

        I---X

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

          .-A---M--------N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `------'

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

          .-A---M--.
         /     /    \
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

--show-pulls

In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME to a later parent.

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

          .-A---M--.   N
         /     /    \ /
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

The --simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).

Commit Ordering

By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.

--date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.
--author-date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the author timestamp order.
--topo-order

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed.

For example, in a commit history like this:

    ---1----2----4----7
        \              \
         3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With --topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

--reverse
Output the commits chosen to be shown (see Commit Limiting section above) in reverse order. Cannot be combined with --walk-reflogs.

Object Traversal

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

--no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]
Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors. This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argument unsorted is given, the commits are shown in the order they were given on the command line. Otherwise (if sorted or no argument was given), the commits are shown in reverse chronological order by commit time. Cannot be combined with --graph.
--do-walk
Overrides a previous --no-walk.

Commit Formatting

--pretty[=<format>] , --format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format> were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

--no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit, either explicit or implied by other options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.
--oneline
This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.
--encoding=<encoding>
Commit objects record the character encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output the original object verbatim.
--expand-tabs=<n> , --expand-tabs , --no-expand-tabs

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>) in the log message before showing it in the output. --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format, or --oneline option given on the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

With an optional <ref> argument, use the ref to find the notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name of the ref.

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "--notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "--notes=foo --notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

--no-notes
Do not show notes. This negates the above --notes option, by resetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown. Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g. "--notes --notes=foo --no-notes --notes=bar" will only show notes from "refs/notes/bar".
--show-notes-by-default
Show the default notes unless options for displaying specific notes are given.
--show-notes[=<ref>] , --[no-]standard-notes
These options are deprecated. Use the above --notes/--no-notes options instead.
--show-signature
Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signature to gpg --verify and show the output.
--relative-date
Synonym for --date=relative.
--date=<format>

Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, such as when using --pretty. log.date config variable sets a default value for the log command's --date option. By default, dates are shown in the original time zone (either committer's or author's). If -local is appended to the format (e.g., iso-local), the user's local time zone is used instead.

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. 2 hours ago. The -local option has no effect for --date=relative.

--date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

  • a space instead of the T date/time delimiter
  • a space between time and time zone
  • no colon between hours and minutes of the time zone

--date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strict ISO 8601 format.

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in email messages.

--date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

--date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

--date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match the current time-zone, and doesn't print the whole date if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it's in the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale's preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

--date=default is the default format, and is based on ctime(3) output. It shows a single line with three-letter day of the week, three-letter month, day-of-month, hour-minute-seconds in "HH:MM:SS" format, followed by 4-digit year, plus timezone information, unless the local time zone is used, e.g. Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000.

--parents
Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit parent…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--children
Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit child…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--left-right

Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is reachable from. Commits from the left side are prefixed with < and those from the right with >. If combined with --boundary, those commits are prefixed with -.

For example, if you have this topology:

             y---b---b  branch B
            / \ /
           /   .
          /   / \
         o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

        $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B

        >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
        >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
        <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
        <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
        -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
        -xxxxxxx... 1st on a
--graph

Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history on the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra lines to be printed in between commits, in order for the graph history to be drawn properly. Cannot be combined with --no-walk.

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.

--show-linear-break[=<barrier>]
When --graph is not used, all history branches are flattened which can make it hard to see that the two consecutive commits do not belong to a linear branch. This option puts a barrier in between them in that case. If <barrier> is specified, it is the string that will be shown instead of the default one.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the hashes of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

  • oneline

    <hash> <title-line>

    This is designed to be as compact as possible.

  • short

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    <title-line>
  • medium

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Date:   <author-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • full

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Commit: <committer>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • fuller

    commit <hash>
    Author:     <author>
    AuthorDate: <author-date>
    Commit:     <committer>
    CommitDate: <committer-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • reference

    <abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

    This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s, %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with any format: with format placeholders, its output is not affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

  • email

    From <hash> <date>
    From: <author>
    Date: <author-date>
    Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • mboxrd

    Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so they aren't confused as starting a new commit.

  • raw

    The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

  • format:<format-string>

    The format:<format-string> format allows you to specify which information you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format, with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n instead of \n.

    E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:

    The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
    The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

    The placeholders are:

    • Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

      %n
      newline
      %%
      a raw %
      %x00
      %x followed by two hexadecimal digits is replaced with a byte with the hexadecimal digits' value (we will call this "literal formatting code" in the rest of this document).
    • Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders:

      %Cred
      switch color to red
      %Cgreen
      switch color to green
      %Cblue
      switch color to blue
      %Creset
      reset color
      %C(…)
      color specification, as described under Values in the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-config(1)”. By default, colors are shown only when enabled for log output (by color.diff, color.ui, or --color, and respecting the auto settings of the former if we are going to a terminal). %C(auto,...) is accepted as a historical synonym for the default (e.g., %C(auto,red)). Specifying %C(always,...) will show the colors even when color is not otherwise enabled (though consider just using --color=always to enable color for the whole output, including this format and anything else git might color). auto alone (i.e. %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloring on the next placeholders until the color is switched again.
      %m
      left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark
      %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])
      switch line wrapping, like the -w option of the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
      %<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
      make the next placeholder take at least N column widths, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Optionally truncate (with ellipsis ..) at the left (ltrunc) ..ft, the middle (mtrunc) mi..le, or the end (trunc) rig.., if the output is longer than N columns. Note 1: that truncating only works correctly with N >= 2. Note 2: spaces around the N and M (see below) values are optional. Note 3: Emojis and other wide characters will take two display columns, which may over-run column boundaries. Note 4: decomposed character combining marks may be misplaced at padding boundaries.
      %<|( <M> )
      make the next placeholder take at least until Mth display column, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Use negative M values for column positions measured from the right hand edge of the terminal window.
      %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding spaces on the left
      %>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )
      similar to %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> ) respectively, except that if the next placeholder takes more spaces than given and there are spaces on its left, use those spaces
      %><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding both sides (i.e. the text is centered)
    • Placeholders that expand to information extracted from the commit:

      %H
      commit hash
      %h
      abbreviated commit hash
      %T
      tree hash
      %t
      abbreviated tree hash
      %P
      parent hashes
      %p
      abbreviated parent hashes
      %an
      author name
      %aN
      author name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ae
      author email
      %aE
      author email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %al
      author email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %aL
      author local-part (see %al) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ad
      author date (format respects --date= option)
      %aD
      author date, RFC2822 style
      %ar
      author date, relative
      %at
      author date, UNIX timestamp
      %ai
      author date, ISO 8601-like format
      %aI
      author date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %as
      author date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ah
      author date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %cn
      committer name
      %cN
      committer name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ce
      committer email
      %cE
      committer email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cl
      committer email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %cL
      committer local-part (see %cl) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cd
      committer date (format respects --date= option)
      %cD
      committer date, RFC2822 style
      %cr
      committer date, relative
      %ct
      committer date, UNIX timestamp
      %ci
      committer date, ISO 8601-like format
      %cI
      committer date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %cs
      committer date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ch
      committer date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %d
      ref names, like the --decorate option of the section called “git-log(1)”
      %D
      ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.
      %(decorate[:<options>])

      ref names with custom decorations. The decorate string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Option values may contain literal formatting codes. These must be used for commas (%x2C) and closing parentheses (%x29), due to their role in the option syntax.

      • prefix=<value>: Shown before the list of ref names. Defaults to " (".
      • suffix=<value>: Shown after the list of ref names. Defaults to ")".
      • separator=<value>: Shown between ref names. Defaults to ", ".
      • pointer=<value>: Shown between HEAD and the branch it points to, if any. Defaults to " -> ".
      • tag=<value>: Shown before tag names. Defaults to "tag: ".

      For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

      %(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

      %(describe[:<options>])

      human-readable name, like the section called “git-describe(1)”; empty string for undescribable commits. The describe string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Descriptions can be inconsistent when tags are added or removed at the same time.

      • tags[=<bool-value>]: Instead of only considering annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as well.
      • abbrev=<number>: Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary according to the number of objects in the repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object name, use <number> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a unique object name.
      • match=<pattern>: Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      • exclude=<pattern>: Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      %S
      ref name given on the command line by which the commit was reached (like git log --source), only works with git log
      %e
      encoding
      %s
      subject
      %f
      sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
      %b
      body
      %B
      raw body (unwrapped subject and body)
      %N
      commit notes
      %GG
      raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit
      %G?
      show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired, "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R" for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key) and "N" for no signature
      %GS
      show the name of the signer for a signed commit
      %GK
      show the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GF
      show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GP
      show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey was used to sign a signed commit
      %GT
      show the trust level for the key used to sign a signed commit
      %gD
      reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or refs/stash@{2 minutes ago}; the format follows the rules described for the -g option. The portion before the @ is the refname as given on the command line (so git log -g refs/heads/master would yield refs/heads/master@{0}).
      %gd
      shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the refname portion is shortened for human readability (so refs/heads/master becomes just master).
      %gn
      reflog identity name
      %gN
      reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ge
      reflog identity email
      %gE
      reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %gs
      reflog subject
      %(trailers[:<options>])

      display the trailers of the body as interpreted by the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”. The trailers string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. If any option is provided multiple times, the last occurrence wins.

      • key=<key>: only show trailers with specified <key>. Matching is done case-insensitively and trailing colon is optional. If option is given multiple times trailer lines matching any of the keys are shown. This option automatically enables the only option so that non-trailer lines in the trailer block are hidden. If that is not desired it can be disabled with only=false. E.g., %(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines with key Reviewed-by.
      • only[=<bool>]: select whether non-trailer lines from the trailer block should be included.
      • separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between trailer lines. Defaults to a line feed character. The string <sep> may contain the literal formatting codes described above. To use comma as separator one must use %x2C as it would otherwise be parsed as next option. E.g., %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C ) shows all trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by a comma and a space.
      • unfold[=<bool>]: make it behave as if interpret-trailer's --unfold option was given. E.g., %(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and shows all trailer lines.
      • keyonly[=<bool>]: only show the key part of the trailer.
      • valueonly[=<bool>]: only show the value part of the trailer.
      • key_value_separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between the key and value of each trailer. Defaults to ": ". Otherwise it shares the same semantics as separator=<sep> above.

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The values taken by --type=bool git-config[1], like yes and off, are all accepted. Giving a boolean option without =<value> is equivalent to giving it with =true.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

  • tformat:

    The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries. This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does. For example:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
    
    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973

    In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two are equivalent:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
    $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

DIFF FORMATTING

By default, git log does not generate any diff output. The options below can be used to show the changes made by each commit.

Note that unless one of --diff-merges variants (including short -m, -c, --cc, and --dd options) is explicitly given, merge commits will not show a diff, even if a diff format like --patch is selected, nor will they match search options like -S. The exception is when --first-parent is in use, in which case first-parent is the default format for merge commits.

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-m
Show diffs for merge commits in the default format. This is similar to --diff-merges=on, except -m will produce no output unless -p is given as well.
-c
Produce combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=combined -p.
--cc
Produce dense combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=dense-combined -p.
--dd
Produce diff with respect to first parent for both merge and regular commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=first-parent -p.
--remerge-diff
Produce remerge-diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=remerge -p.
--no-diff-merges
Synonym for --diff-merges=off.
--diff-merges=<format>

Specify diff format to be used for merge commits. Default is off unless --first-parent is in use, in which case first-parent is the default.

The following formats are supported:

off, none
Disable output of diffs for merge commits. Useful to override implied value.
on, m
Make diff output for merge commits to be shown in the default format. The default format can be changed using log.diffMerges configuration variable, whose default value is separate.
first-parent, 1
Show full diff with respect to first parent. This is the same format as --patch produces for non-merge commits.
separate
Show full diff with respect to each of parents. Separate log entry and diff is generated for each parent.
combined, c
Show differences from each of the parents to the merge result simultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff between a parent and the result one at a time. Furthermore, it lists only files which were modified from all parents.
dense-combined, cc
Further compress output produced by --diff-merges=combined by omitting uninteresting hunks whose contents in the parents have only two variants and the merge result picks one of them without modification.
remerge, r

Remerge two-parent merge commits to create a temporary tree object--potentially containing files with conflict markers and such. A diff is then shown between that temporary tree and the actual merge commit.

The output emitted when this option is used is subject to change, and so is its interaction with other options (unless explicitly documented).

--combined-all-paths
Cause combined diffs (used for merge commits) to list the name of the file from all parents. It thus only has effect when --diff-merges=[dense-]combined is in use, and is likely only useful if filename changes are detected (i.e. when either rename or copy detection have been requested).
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
For each commit, show a summary of changes using the raw diff format. See the "RAW OUTPUT FORMAT" section of the section called “git-diff(1)”. This is different from showing the log itself in raw format, which you can achieve with --format=raw.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
-t
Show the tree objects in the diff output.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

Separate the commits with NULs instead of newlines.

Also, when --raw or --numstat has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each commit. For following files across renames while traversing history, see --follow. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

EXAMPLES

git log --no-merges
Show the whole commit history, but skip any merges
git log v2.6.12.. include/scsi drivers/scsi
Show all commits since version v2.6.12 that changed any file in the include/scsi or drivers/scsi subdirectories
git log --since="2 weeks ago" -- gitk
Show the changes during the last two weeks to the file gitk. The -- is necessary to avoid confusion with the branch named gitk
git log --name-status release..test
Show the commits that are in the "test" branch but not yet in the "release" branch, along with the list of paths each commit modifies.
git log --follow builtin/rev-list.c
Shows the commits that changed builtin/rev-list.c, including those commits that occurred before the file was given its present name.
git log --branches --not --remotes=origin
Shows all commits that are in any of local branches but not in any of remote-tracking branches for origin (what you have that origin doesn't).
git log master --not --remotes=*/master
Shows all commits that are in local master but not in any remote repository master branches.
git log -p -m --first-parent
Shows the history including change diffs, but only from the main branch perspective, skipping commits that come from merged branches, and showing full diffs of changes introduced by the merges. This makes sense only when following a strict policy of merging all topic branches when staying on a single integration branch.
git log -L '/int main/',/^}/:main.c
Shows how the function main() in the file main.c evolved over time.
git log -3
Limits the number of commits to show to 3.

DISCUSSION

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

  • The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
  • Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), the section called “gitignore(5)”, the section called “gitattributes(5)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

    Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

  • Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

CONFIGURATION

See the section called “git-config(1)” for core variables and the section called “git-diff(1)” for settings related to diff generation.

format.pretty
Default for the --format option. (See Pretty Formats above.) Defaults to medium.
i18n.logOutputEncoding
Encoding to use when displaying logs. (See Discussion above.) Defaults to the value of i18n.commitEncoding if set, and UTF-8 otherwise.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

log.abbrevCommit
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --abbrev-commit. You may override this option with --no-abbrev-commit.
log.date

Set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date option. See the section called “git-log(1)” for details.

If the format is set to "auto:foo" and the pager is in use, format "foo" will be used for the date format. Otherwise, "default" will be used.

log.decorate
Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the log command. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. This is the same as the --decorate option of the git log.
log.initialDecorationSet
By default, git log only shows decorations for certain known ref namespaces. If all is specified, then show all refs as decorations.
log.excludeDecoration
Exclude the specified patterns from the log decorations. This is similar to the --decorate-refs-exclude command-line option, but the config option can be overridden by the --decorate-refs option.
log.diffMerges
Set diff format to be used when --diff-merges=on is specified, see --diff-merges in the section called “git-log(1)” for details. Defaults to separate.
log.follow
If true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files and does not work well on non-linear history.
log.graphColors
A list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to draw history lines in git log --graph.
log.showRoot
If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like the section called “git-log(1)” or the section called “git-whatchanged(1)”, which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.
log.showSignature
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --show-signature.
log.mailmap
If true, makes the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)” assume --use-mailmap, otherwise assume --no-use-mailmap. True by default.
notes.mergeStrategy

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on each strategy.

This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy option to the section called “git-notes(1)”.

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy
Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general notes.mergeStrategy. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on the available strategies.
notes.displayRef

Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once), in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the git log family of commands.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the the section called “git-log(1)” family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option accepted by those commands.

The effective value of core.notesRef (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

notes.rewrite.<command>

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true. See also notes.rewriteRef below.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

notes.rewriteMode

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the notes.rewrite.<command> option), determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

notes.rewriteRef

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times.

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further description of its format.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-ls-files(1)

NAME

git-ls-files - Show information about files in the index and the working tree

SYNOPSIS

git ls-files [-z] [-t] [-v] [-f]
                [-c|--cached] [-d|--deleted] [-o|--others] [-i|--ignored]
                [-s|--stage] [-u|--unmerged] [-k|--killed] [-m|--modified]
                [--resolve-undo]
                [--directory [--no-empty-directory]] [--eol]
                [--deduplicate]
                [-x <pattern>|--exclude=<pattern>]
                [-X <file>|--exclude-from=<file>]
                [--exclude-per-directory=<file>]
                [--exclude-standard]
                [--error-unmatch] [--with-tree=<tree-ish>]
                [--full-name] [--recurse-submodules]
                [--abbrev[=<n>]] [--format=<format>] [--] [<file>…]

DESCRIPTION

This command merges the file listing in the index with the actual working directory list, and shows different combinations of the two.

Several flags can be used to determine which files are shown, and each file may be printed multiple times if there are multiple entries in the index or if multiple statuses are applicable for the relevant file selection options.

OPTIONS

-c , --cached
Show all files cached in Git's index, i.e. all tracked files. (This is the default if no -c/-s/-d/-o/-u/-k/-m/--resolve-undo options are specified.)
-d , --deleted
Show files with an unstaged deletion
-m , --modified
Show files with an unstaged modification (note that an unstaged deletion also counts as an unstaged modification)
-o , --others
Show other (i.e. untracked) files in the output
-i , --ignored
Show only ignored files in the output. Must be used with either an explicit -c or -o. When showing files in the index (i.e. when used with -c), print only those files matching an exclude pattern. When showing "other" files (i.e. when used with -o), show only those matched by an exclude pattern. Standard ignore rules are not automatically activated; therefore, at least one of the --exclude* options is required.
-s , --stage
Show staged contents' mode bits, object name and stage number in the output.
--directory
If a whole directory is classified as "other", show just its name (with a trailing slash) and not its whole contents. Has no effect without -o/--others.
--no-empty-directory
Do not list empty directories. Has no effect without --directory.
-u , --unmerged
Show information about unmerged files in the output, but do not show any other tracked files (forces --stage, overrides --cached).
-k , --killed
Show untracked files on the filesystem that need to be removed due to file/directory conflicts for tracked files to be able to be written to the filesystem.
--resolve-undo
Show files having resolve-undo information in the index together with their resolve-undo information. (resolve-undo information is what is used to implement "git checkout -m $PATH", i.e. to recreate merge conflicts that were accidentally resolved)
-z
\0 line termination on output and do not quote filenames. See OUTPUT below for more information.
--deduplicate
When only filenames are shown, suppress duplicates that may come from having multiple stages during a merge, or giving --deleted and --modified option at the same time. When any of the -t, --unmerged, or --stage option is in use, this option has no effect.
-x <pattern> , --exclude=<pattern>
Skip untracked files matching pattern. Note that pattern is a shell wildcard pattern. See EXCLUDE PATTERNS below for more information.
-X <file> , --exclude-from=<file>
Read exclude patterns from <file>; 1 per line.
--exclude-per-directory=<file>
Read additional exclude patterns that apply only to the directory and its subdirectories in <file>. If you are trying to emulate the way Porcelain commands work, using the --exclude-standard option instead is easier and more thorough.
--exclude-standard
Add the standard Git exclusions: .git/info/exclude, .gitignore in each directory, and the user's global exclusion file.
--error-unmatch
If any <file> does not appear in the index, treat this as an error (return 1).
--with-tree=<tree-ish>
When using --error-unmatch to expand the user supplied <file> (i.e. path pattern) arguments to paths, pretend that paths which were removed in the index since the named <tree-ish> are still present. Using this option with -s or -u options does not make any sense.
-t

Show status tags together with filenames. Note that for scripting purposes, the section called “git-status(1)” --porcelain and the section called “git-diff-files(1)” --name-status are almost always superior alternatives; users should look at the section called “git-status(1)” --short or the section called “git-diff(1)” --name-status for more user-friendly alternatives.

This option provides a reason for showing each filename, in the form of a status tag (which is followed by a space and then the filename). The status tags are all single characters from the following list:

H
tracked file that is not either unmerged or skip-worktree
S
tracked file that is skip-worktree
M
tracked file that is unmerged
R
tracked file with unstaged removal/deletion
C
tracked file with unstaged modification/change
K
untracked paths which are part of file/directory conflicts which prevent checking out tracked files
?
untracked file
U
file with resolve-undo information
-v
Similar to -t, but use lowercase letters for files that are marked as assume unchanged (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”).
-f
Similar to -t, but use lowercase letters for files that are marked as fsmonitor valid (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”).
--full-name
When run from a subdirectory, the command usually outputs paths relative to the current directory. This option forces paths to be output relative to the project top directory.
--recurse-submodules
Recursively calls ls-files on each active submodule in the repository. Currently there is only support for the --cached and --stage modes.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
--debug
After each line that describes a file, add more data about its cache entry. This is intended to show as much information as possible for manual inspection; the exact format may change at any time.
--eol

Show <eolinfo> and <eolattr> of files. <eolinfo> is the file content identification used by Git when the "text" attribute is "auto" (or not set and core.autocrlf is not false). <eolinfo> is either "-text", "none", "lf", "crlf", "mixed" or "".

"" means the file is not a regular file, it is not in the index or not accessible in the working tree.

<eolattr> is the attribute that is used when checking out or committing, it is either "", "-text", "text", "text=auto", "text eol=lf", "text eol=crlf". Since Git 2.10 "text=auto eol=lf" and "text=auto eol=crlf" are supported.

Both the <eolinfo> in the index ("i/<eolinfo>") and in the working tree ("w/<eolinfo>") are shown for regular files, followed by the ("attr/<eolattr>").

--sparse
If the index is sparse, show the sparse directories without expanding to the contained files. Sparse directories will be shown with a trailing slash, such as "x/" for a sparse directory "x".
--format=<format>
A string that interpolates %(fieldname) from the result being shown. It also interpolates %% to %, and %xXX where XX are hex digits interpolates to character with hex code XX; for example %x00 interpolates to \0 (NUL), %x09 to \t (TAB) and %x0a to \n (LF). --format cannot be combined with -s, -o, -k, -t, --resolve-undo and --eol.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<file>
Files to show. If no files are given all files which match the other specified criteria are shown.

OUTPUT

git ls-files just outputs the filenames unless --stage is specified in which case it outputs:

[<tag> ]<mode> <object> <stage> <file>

git ls-files --eol will show i/<eolinfo><SPACES>w/<eolinfo><SPACES>attr/<eolattr><SPACE*><TAB><file>

git ls-files --unmerged and git ls-files --stage can be used to examine detailed information on unmerged paths.

For an unmerged path, instead of recording a single mode/SHA-1 pair, the index records up to three such pairs; one from tree O in stage 1, A in stage 2, and B in stage 3. This information can be used by the user (or the porcelain) to see what should eventually be recorded at the path. (see the section called “git-read-tree(1)” for more information on state)

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

It is possible to print in a custom format by using the --format option, which is able to interpolate different fields using a %(fieldname) notation. For example, if you only care about the "objectname" and "path" fields, you can execute with a specific "--format" like

git ls-files --format='%(objectname) %(path)'

FIELD NAMES

The way each path is shown can be customized by using the --format=<format> option, where the %(fieldname) in the <format> string for various aspects of the index entry are interpolated. The following "fieldname" are understood:

objectmode
The mode of the file which is recorded in the index.
objecttype
The object type of the file which is recorded in the index.
objectname
The name of the file which is recorded in the index.
objectsize[:padded]
The object size of the file which is recorded in the index ("-" if the object is a commit or tree). It also supports a padded format of size with "%(objectsize:padded)".
stage
The stage of the file which is recorded in the index.
eolinfo:index , eolinfo:worktree
The <eolinfo> (see the description of the --eol option) of the contents in the index or in the worktree for the path.
eolattr
The <eolattr> (see the description of the --eol option) that applies to the path.
path
The pathname of the file which is recorded in the index.

EXCLUDE PATTERNS

git ls-files can use a list of "exclude patterns" when traversing the directory tree and finding files to show when the flags --others or --ignored are specified. the section called “gitignore(5)” specifies the format of exclude patterns.

These exclude patterns can be specified from the following places, in order:

  1. The command-line flag --exclude=<pattern> specifies a single pattern. Patterns are ordered in the same order they appear in the command line.
  2. The command-line flag --exclude-from=<file> specifies a file containing a list of patterns. Patterns are ordered in the same order they appear in the file.
  3. The command-line flag --exclude-per-directory=<name> specifies a name of the file in each directory git ls-files examines, normally .gitignore. Files in deeper directories take precedence. Patterns are ordered in the same order they appear in the files.

A pattern specified on the command line with --exclude or read from the file specified with --exclude-from is relative to the top of the directory tree. A pattern read from a file specified by --exclude-per-directory is relative to the directory that the pattern file appears in.

Generally, you should be able to use --exclude-standard when you want the exclude rules applied the same way as what Porcelain commands do. To emulate what --exclude-standard specifies, you can give --exclude-per-directory=.gitignore, and then specify:

  1. The file specified by the core.excludesfile configuration variable, if exists, or the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore file.
  2. The $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file.

via the --exclude-from= option.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-ls-remote(1)

NAME

git-ls-remote - List references in a remote repository

SYNOPSIS

git ls-remote [--branches] [--tags] [--refs] [--upload-pack=<exec>]
              [-q | --quiet] [--exit-code] [--get-url] [--sort=<key>]
              [--symref] [<repository> [<patterns>…]]

DESCRIPTION

Displays references available in a remote repository along with the associated commit IDs.

OPTIONS

-b , --branches , -t , --tags
Limit to only local branches and local tags, respectively. These options are not mutually exclusive; when given both, references stored in refs/heads and refs/tags are displayed. Note that --heads and -h are deprecated synonyms for --branches and -b and may be removed in the future. Also note that git ls-remote -h used without anything else on the command line gives help, consistent with other git subcommands.
--refs
Do not show peeled tags or pseudorefs like HEAD in the output.
-q , --quiet
Do not print remote URL to stderr.
--upload-pack=<exec>
Specify the full path of git-upload-pack on the remote host. This allows listing references from repositories accessed via SSH and where the SSH daemon does not use the PATH configured by the user.
--exit-code
Exit with status "2" when no matching refs are found in the remote repository. Usually the command exits with status "0" to indicate it successfully talked with the remote repository, whether it found any matching refs.
--get-url
Expand the URL of the given remote repository taking into account any "url.<base>.insteadOf" config setting (See the section called “git-config(1)”) and exit without talking to the remote.
--symref
In addition to the object pointed by it, show the underlying ref pointed by it when showing a symbolic ref. Currently, upload-pack only shows the symref HEAD, so it will be the only one shown by ls-remote.
--sort=<key>
Sort based on the key given. Prefix - to sort in descending order of the value. Supports "version:refname" or "v:refname" (tag names are treated as versions). The "version:refname" sort order can also be affected by the "versionsort.suffix" configuration variable. See the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)” for more sort options, but be aware keys like committerdate that require access to the objects themselves will not work for refs whose objects have not yet been fetched from the remote, and will give a missing object error.
-o <option> , --server-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server when communicating using protocol version 2. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF character. When multiple --server-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the other side in the order listed on the command line. When no --server-option=<option> is given from the command line, the values of configuration variable remote.<name>.serverOption are used instead.
<repository>
The "remote" repository to query. This parameter can be either a URL or the name of a remote (see the GIT URLS and REMOTES sections of the section called “git-fetch(1)”).
<patterns>…
When unspecified, all references, after filtering done with --heads and --tags, are shown. When <patterns>… are specified, only references matching one or more of the given patterns are displayed. Each pattern is interpreted as a glob (see glob in the section called “gitglossary(7)”) which is matched against the "tail" of a ref, starting either from the start of the ref (so a full name like refs/heads/foo matches) or from a slash separator (so bar matches refs/heads/bar but not refs/heads/foobar).

OUTPUT

The output is in the format:

<oid> TAB <ref> LF

When showing an annotated tag, unless --refs is given, two such lines are shown: one with the refname for the tag itself as <ref>, and another with <ref> followed by ^{}. The <oid> on the latter line shows the name of the object the tag points at.

EXAMPLES

  • List all references (including symbolics and pseudorefs), peeling tags:

    $ git ls-remote
    27d43aaaf50ef0ae014b88bba294f93658016a2e        HEAD
    950264636c68591989456e3ba0a5442f93152c1a        refs/heads/main
    d9ab777d41f92a8c1684c91cfb02053d7dd1046b        refs/heads/next
    d4ca2e3147b409459955613c152220f4db848ee1        refs/tags/v2.40.0
    73876f4861cd3d187a4682290ab75c9dccadbc56        refs/tags/v2.40.0^{}
  • List all references matching given patterns:

    $ git ls-remote http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git master seen rc
    5fe978a5381f1fbad26a80e682ddd2a401966740        refs/heads/master
    c781a84b5204fb294c9ccc79f8b3baceeb32c061        refs/heads/seen
  • List only tags matching a given wildcard pattern:

    $ git ls-remote --tags http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git v\*
    485a869c64a68cc5795dd99689797c5900f4716d        refs/tags/v2.39.2
    cbf04937d5b9fcf0a76c28f69e6294e9e3ecd7e6        refs/tags/v2.39.2^{}
    d4ca2e3147b409459955613c152220f4db848ee1        refs/tags/v2.40.0
    73876f4861cd3d187a4682290ab75c9dccadbc56        refs/tags/v2.40.0^{}

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-ls-tree(1)

NAME

git-ls-tree - List the contents of a tree object

SYNOPSIS

git ls-tree [-d] [-r] [-t] [-l] [-z]
            [--name-only] [--name-status] [--object-only] [--full-name] [--full-tree] [--abbrev[=<n>]] [--format=<format>]
            <tree-ish> [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Lists the contents of a given tree object, like what "/bin/ls -a" does in the current working directory. Note that:

  • the behaviour is slightly different from that of "/bin/ls" in that the <path> denotes just a list of patterns to match, e.g. so specifying directory name (without -r) will behave differently, and order of the arguments does not matter.
  • the behaviour is similar to that of "/bin/ls" in that the <path> is taken as relative to the current working directory. E.g. when you are in a directory sub that has a directory dir, you can run git ls-tree -r HEAD dir to list the contents of the tree (that is sub/dir in HEAD). You don't want to give a tree that is not at the root level (e.g. git ls-tree -r HEAD:sub dir) in this case, as that would result in asking for sub/sub/dir in the HEAD commit. However, the current working directory can be ignored by passing --full-tree option.

OPTIONS

<tree-ish>
Id of a tree-ish.
-d
Show only the named tree entry itself, not its children.
-r
Recurse into sub-trees.
-t
Show tree entries even when going to recurse them. Has no effect if -r was not passed. -d implies -t.
-l , --long
Show object size of blob (file) entries.
-z
\0 line termination on output and do not quote filenames. See OUTPUT FORMAT below for more information.
--name-only , --name-status
List only filenames (instead of the "long" output), one per line. Cannot be combined with --object-only.
--object-only
List only names of the objects, one per line. Cannot be combined with --name-only or --name-status. This is equivalent to specifying --format='%(objectname)', but for both this option and that exact format the command takes a hand-optimized codepath instead of going through the generic formatting mechanism.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
--full-name
Instead of showing the path names relative to the current working directory, show the full path names.
--full-tree
Do not limit the listing to the current working directory. Implies --full-name.
--format=<format>
A string that interpolates %(fieldname) from the result being shown. It also interpolates %% to %, and %xNN where NN are hex digits interpolates to character with hex code NN; for example %x00 interpolates to \0 (NUL), %x09 to \t (TAB) and %x0a to \n (LF). When specified, --format cannot be combined with other format-altering options, including --long, --name-only and --object-only.
[<path>…]
When paths are given, show them (note that this isn't really raw pathnames, but rather a list of patterns to match). Otherwise implicitly uses the root level of the tree as the sole path argument.

Output Format

The output format of ls-tree is determined by either the --format option, or other format-altering options such as --name-only etc. (see --format above).

The use of certain --format directives is equivalent to using those options, but invoking the full formatting machinery can be slower than using an appropriate formatting option.

In cases where the --format would exactly map to an existing option ls-tree will use the appropriate faster path. Thus the default format is equivalent to:

%(objectmode) %(objecttype) %(objectname)%x09%(path)

This output format is compatible with what --index-info --stdin of git update-index expects.

When the -l option is used, format changes to

%(objectmode) %(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize:padded)%x09%(path)

Object size identified by <objectname> is given in bytes, and right-justified with minimum width of 7 characters. Object size is given only for blobs (file) entries; for other entries - character is used in place of size.

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Using -z the filename is output verbatim and the line is terminated by a NUL byte.

Customized format:

It is possible to print in a custom format by using the --format option, which is able to interpolate different fields using a %(fieldname) notation. For example, if you only care about the "objectname" and "path" fields, you can execute with a specific "--format" like

git ls-tree --format='%(objectname) %(path)' <tree-ish>

FIELD NAMES

Various values from structured fields can be used to interpolate into the resulting output. For each outputting line, the following names can be used:

objectmode
The mode of the object.
objecttype
The type of the object (commit, blob or tree).
objectname
The name of the object.
objectsize[:padded]
The size of a blob object ("-" if it's a commit or tree). It also supports a padded format of size with "%(objectsize:padded)".
path
The pathname of the object.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mailinfo(1)

NAME

git-mailinfo - Extracts patch and authorship from a single e-mail message

SYNOPSIS

git mailinfo [-k|-b] [-u | --encoding=<encoding> | -n]
               [--[no-]scissors] [--quoted-cr=<action>]
               <msg> <patch>

DESCRIPTION

Reads a single e-mail message from the standard input, and writes the commit log message in <msg> file, and the patches in <patch> file. The author name, e-mail and e-mail subject are written out to the standard output to be used by git am to create a commit. It is usually not necessary to use this command directly. See the section called “git-am(1)” instead.

OPTIONS

-k

Usually the program removes email cruft from the Subject: header line to extract the title line for the commit log message. This option prevents this munging, and is most useful when used to read back git format-patch -k output.

Specifically, the following are removed until none of them remain:

  • Leading and trailing whitespace.
  • Leading Re:, re:, and :.
  • Leading bracketed strings (between [ and ], usually [PATCH]).

Finally, runs of whitespace are normalized to a single ASCII space character.

-b
When -k is not in effect, all leading strings bracketed with [ and ] pairs are stripped. This option limits the stripping to only the pairs whose bracketed string contains the word "PATCH".
-u

The commit log message, author name and author email are taken from the e-mail, and after minimally decoding MIME transfer encoding, re-coded in the charset specified by i18n.commitEncoding (defaulting to UTF-8) by transliterating them. This used to be optional but now it is the default.

Note that the patch is always used as-is without charset conversion, even with this flag.

--encoding=<encoding>
Similar to -u. But when re-coding, the charset specified here is used instead of the one specified by i18n.commitEncoding or UTF-8.
-n
Disable all charset re-coding of the metadata.
-m , --message-id
Copy the Message-ID header at the end of the commit message. This is useful in order to associate commits with mailing list discussions.
--scissors

Remove everything in body before a scissors line (e.g. "-- >8 --"). The line represents scissors and perforation marks, and is used to request the reader to cut the message at that line. If that line appears in the body of the message before the patch, everything before it (including the scissors line itself) is ignored when this option is used.

This is useful if you want to begin your message in a discussion thread with comments and suggestions on the message you are responding to, and to conclude it with a patch submission, separating the discussion and the beginning of the proposed commit log message with a scissors line.

This can be enabled by default with the configuration option mailinfo.scissors.

--no-scissors
Ignore scissors lines. Useful for overriding mailinfo.scissors settings.
--quoted-cr=<action>

Action when processes email messages sent with base64 or quoted-printable encoding, and the decoded lines end with a CRLF instead of a simple LF.

The valid actions are:

  • nowarn: Git will do nothing when such a CRLF is found.
  • warn: Git will issue a warning for each message if such a CRLF is found.
  • strip: Git will convert those CRLF to LF.

The default action could be set by configuration option mailinfo.quotedCR. If no such configuration option has been set, warn will be used.

<msg>
The commit log message extracted from e-mail, usually except the title line which comes from e-mail Subject.
<patch>
The patch extracted from e-mail.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

mailinfo.scissors
If true, makes the section called “git-mailinfo(1)” (and therefore the section called “git-am(1)”) act by default as if the --scissors option was provided on the command-line. When active, this feature removes everything from the message body before a scissors line (i.e. consisting mainly of ">8", "8<" and "-").

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mailsplit(1)

NAME

git-mailsplit - Simple UNIX mbox splitter program

SYNOPSIS

git mailsplit [-b] [-f<nn>] [-d<prec>] [--keep-cr] [--mboxrd]
                -o<directory> [--] [(<mbox>|<Maildir>)…]

DESCRIPTION

Splits a mbox file or a Maildir into a list of files: "0001" "0002" .. in the specified directory so you can process them further from there.

Important

Maildir splitting relies upon filenames being sorted to output patches in the correct order.

OPTIONS

<mbox>
Mbox file to split. If not given, the mbox is read from the standard input.
<Maildir>
Root of the Maildir to split. This directory should contain the cur, tmp and new subdirectories.
-o<directory>
Directory in which to place the individual messages.
-b
If any file doesn't begin with a From line, assume it is a single mail message instead of signaling an error.
-d<prec>
Instead of the default 4 digits with leading zeros, different precision can be specified for the generated filenames.
-f<nn>
Skip the first <nn> numbers, for example if -f3 is specified, start the numbering with 0004.
--keep-cr
Do not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n.
--mboxrd
Input is of the "mboxrd" format and "^>+From " line escaping is reversed.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-maintenance(1)

NAME

git-maintenance - Run tasks to optimize Git repository data

SYNOPSIS

git maintenance run [<options>]
git maintenance start [--scheduler=<scheduler>]
git maintenance (stop|register|unregister) [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

Run tasks to optimize Git repository data, speeding up other Git commands and reducing storage requirements for the repository.

Git commands that add repository data, such as git add or git fetch, are optimized for a responsive user experience. These commands do not take time to optimize the Git data, since such optimizations scale with the full size of the repository while these user commands each perform a relatively small action.

The git maintenance command provides flexibility for how to optimize the Git repository.

SUBCOMMANDS

run
Run one or more maintenance tasks. If one or more --task options are specified, then those tasks are run in that order. Otherwise, the tasks are determined by which maintenance.<task>.enabled config options are true. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.
start
Start running maintenance on the current repository. This performs the same config updates as the register subcommand, then updates the background scheduler to run git maintenance run --scheduled on an hourly basis.
stop
Halt the background maintenance schedule. The current repository is not removed from the list of maintained repositories, in case the background maintenance is restarted later.
register

Initialize Git config values so any scheduled maintenance will start running on this repository. This adds the repository to the maintenance.repo config variable in the current user's global config, or the config specified by --config-file option, and enables some recommended configuration values for maintenance.<task>.schedule. The tasks that are enabled are safe for running in the background without disrupting foreground processes.

The register subcommand will also set the maintenance.strategy config value to incremental, if this value is not previously set. The incremental strategy uses the following schedule for each maintenance task:

  • gc: disabled.
  • commit-graph: hourly.
  • prefetch: hourly.
  • loose-objects: daily.
  • incremental-repack: daily.

git maintenance register will also disable foreground maintenance by setting maintenance.auto = false in the current repository. This config setting will remain after a git maintenance unregister command.

unregister

Remove the current repository from background maintenance. This only removes the repository from the configured list. It does not stop the background maintenance processes from running.

The unregister subcommand will report an error if the current repository is not already registered. Use the --force option to return success even when the current repository is not registered.

TASKS

commit-graph
The commit-graph job updates the commit-graph files incrementally, then verifies that the written data is correct. The incremental write is safe to run alongside concurrent Git processes since it will not expire .graph files that were in the previous commit-graph-chain file. They will be deleted by a later run based on the expiration delay.
prefetch

The prefetch task updates the object directory with the latest objects from all registered remotes. For each remote, a git fetch command is run. The configured refspec is modified to place all requested refs within refs/prefetch/. Also, tags are not updated.

This is done to avoid disrupting the remote-tracking branches. The end users expect these refs to stay unmoved unless they initiate a fetch. However, with the prefetch task, the objects necessary to complete a later real fetch would already be obtained, making the real fetch faster. In the ideal case, it will just become an update to a bunch of remote-tracking branches without any object transfer.

The remote.<name>.skipFetchAll configuration can be used to exclude a particular remote from getting prefetched.

gc
Clean up unnecessary files and optimize the local repository. "GC" stands for "garbage collection," but this task performs many smaller tasks. This task can be expensive for large repositories, as it repacks all Git objects into a single pack-file. It can also be disruptive in some situations, as it deletes stale data. See the section called “git-gc(1)” for more details on garbage collection in Git.
loose-objects

The loose-objects job cleans up loose objects and places them into pack-files. In order to prevent race conditions with concurrent Git commands, it follows a two-step process. First, it deletes any loose objects that already exist in a pack-file; concurrent Git processes will examine the pack-file for the object data instead of the loose object. Second, it creates a new pack-file (starting with "loose-") containing a batch of loose objects.

The batch size defaults to fifty thousand objects to prevent the job from taking too long on a repository with many loose objects. Use the maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize config option to adjust this size, including a value of 0 to remove the limit.

The gc task writes unreachable objects as loose objects to be cleaned up by a later step only if they are not re-added to a pack-file; for this reason it is not advisable to enable both the loose-objects and gc tasks at the same time.

incremental-repack
The incremental-repack job repacks the object directory using the multi-pack-index feature. In order to prevent race conditions with concurrent Git commands, it follows a two-step process. First, it calls git multi-pack-index expire to delete pack-files unreferenced by the multi-pack-index file. Second, it calls git multi-pack-index repack to select several small pack-files and repack them into a bigger one, and then update the multi-pack-index entries that refer to the small pack-files to refer to the new pack-file. This prepares those small pack-files for deletion upon the next run of git multi-pack-index expire. The selection of the small pack-files is such that the expected size of the big pack-file is at least the batch size; see the --batch-size option for the repack subcommand in the section called “git-multi-pack-index(1)”. The default batch-size is zero, which is a special case that attempts to repack all pack-files into a single pack-file.
pack-refs
The pack-refs task collects the loose reference files and collects them into a single file. This speeds up operations that need to iterate across many references. See the section called “git-pack-refs(1)” for more information.
reflog-expire
The reflog-expire task deletes any entries in the reflog older than the expiry threshold. See the section called “git-reflog(1)” for more information.
rerere-gc
The rerere-gc task invokes garbage collection for stale entries in the rerere cache. See the section called “git-rerere(1)” for more information.
worktree-prune
The worktree-prune task deletes stale or broken worktrees. See the section called “git-worktree(1)” for more information.

OPTIONS

--auto
When combined with the run subcommand, run maintenance tasks only if certain thresholds are met. For example, the gc task runs when the number of loose objects exceeds the number stored in the gc.auto config setting, or when the number of pack-files exceeds the gc.autoPackLimit config setting. Not compatible with the --schedule option.
--schedule
When combined with the run subcommand, run maintenance tasks only if certain time conditions are met, as specified by the maintenance.<task>.schedule config value for each <task>. This config value specifies a number of seconds since the last time that task ran, according to the maintenance.<task>.lastRun config value. The tasks that are tested are those provided by the --task=<task> option(s) or those with maintenance.<task>.enabled set to true.
--quiet
Do not report progress or other information over stderr.
--task=<task>
If this option is specified one or more times, then only run the specified tasks in the specified order. If no --task=<task> arguments are specified, then only the tasks with maintenance.<task>.enabled configured as true are considered. See the TASKS section for the list of accepted <task> values.
--scheduler=auto|crontab|systemd-timer|launchctl|schtasks
When combined with the start subcommand, specify the scheduler for running the hourly, daily and weekly executions of git maintenance run. Possible values for <scheduler> are auto, crontab (POSIX), systemd-timer (Linux), launchctl (macOS), and schtasks (Windows). When auto is specified, the appropriate platform-specific scheduler is used; on Linux, systemd-timer is used if available, otherwise crontab. Default is auto.

TROUBLESHOOTING

The git maintenance command is designed to simplify the repository maintenance patterns while minimizing user wait time during Git commands. A variety of configuration options are available to allow customizing this process. The default maintenance options focus on operations that complete quickly, even on large repositories.

Users may find some cases where scheduled maintenance tasks do not run as frequently as intended. Each git maintenance run command takes a lock on the repository's object database, and this prevents other concurrent git maintenance run commands from running on the same repository. Without this safeguard, competing processes could leave the repository in an unpredictable state.

The background maintenance schedule runs git maintenance run processes on an hourly basis. Each run executes the "hourly" tasks. At midnight, that process also executes the "daily" tasks. At midnight on the first day of the week, that process also executes the "weekly" tasks. A single process iterates over each registered repository, performing the scheduled tasks for that frequency. The processes are scheduled to a random minute of the hour per client to spread out the load that multiple clients might generate (e.g. from prefetching). Depending on the number of registered repositories and their sizes, this process may take longer than an hour. In this case, multiple git maintenance run commands may run on the same repository at the same time, colliding on the object database lock. This results in one of the two tasks not running.

If you find that some maintenance windows are taking longer than one hour to complete, then consider reducing the complexity of your maintenance tasks. For example, the gc task is much slower than the incremental-repack task. However, this comes at a cost of a slightly larger object database. Consider moving more expensive tasks to be run less frequently.

Expert users may consider scheduling their own maintenance tasks using a different schedule than is available through git maintenance start and Git configuration options. These users should be aware of the object database lock and how concurrent git maintenance run commands behave. Further, the git gc command should not be combined with git maintenance run commands. git gc modifies the object database but does not take the lock in the same way as git maintenance run. If possible, use git maintenance run --task=gc instead of git gc.

The following sections describe the mechanisms put in place to run background maintenance by git maintenance start and how to customize them.

BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON POSIX SYSTEMS

The standard mechanism for scheduling background tasks on POSIX systems is cron(8). This tool executes commands based on a given schedule. The current list of user-scheduled tasks can be found by running crontab -l. The schedule written by git maintenance start is similar to this:

# BEGIN GIT MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE
# The following schedule was created by Git
# Any edits made in this region might be
# replaced in the future by a Git command.

0 1-23 * * * "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=hourly
0 0 * * 1-6 "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=daily
0 0 * * 0 "/<path>/git" --exec-path="/<path>" for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo maintenance run --schedule=weekly

# END GIT MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE

The comments are used as a region to mark the schedule as written by Git. Any modifications within this region will be completely deleted by git maintenance stop or overwritten by git maintenance start.

The crontab entry specifies the full path of the git executable to ensure that the executed git command is the same one with which git maintenance start was issued independent of PATH. If the same user runs git maintenance start with multiple Git executables, then only the latest executable is used.

These commands use git for-each-repo --config=maintenance.repo to run git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> on each repository listed in the multi-valued maintenance.repo config option. These are typically loaded from the user-specific global config. The git maintenance process then determines which maintenance tasks are configured to run on each repository with each <frequency> using the maintenance.<task>.schedule config options. These values are loaded from the global or repository config values.

If the config values are insufficient to achieve your desired background maintenance schedule, then you can create your own schedule. If you run crontab -e, then an editor will load with your user-specific cron schedule. In that editor, you can add your own schedule lines. You could start by adapting the default schedule listed earlier, or you could read the crontab(5) documentation for advanced scheduling techniques. Please do use the full path and --exec-path techniques from the default schedule to ensure you are executing the correct binaries in your schedule.

BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON LINUX SYSTEMD SYSTEMS

While Linux supports cron, depending on the distribution, cron may be an optional package not necessarily installed. On modern Linux distributions, systemd timers are superseding it.

If user systemd timers are available, they will be used as a replacement of cron.

In this case, git maintenance start will create user systemd timer units and start the timers. The current list of user-scheduled tasks can be found by running systemctl --user list-timers. The timers written by git maintenance start are similar to this:

$ systemctl --user list-timers
NEXT                         LEFT          LAST                         PASSED     UNIT                         ACTIVATES
Thu 2021-04-29 19:00:00 CEST 42min left    Thu 2021-04-29 18:00:11 CEST 17min ago  git-maintenance@hourly.timer git-maintenance@hourly.service
Fri 2021-04-30 00:00:00 CEST 5h 42min left Thu 2021-04-29 00:00:11 CEST 18h ago    git-maintenance@daily.timer  git-maintenance@daily.service
Mon 2021-05-03 00:00:00 CEST 3 days left   Mon 2021-04-26 00:00:11 CEST 3 days ago git-maintenance@weekly.timer git-maintenance@weekly.service

One timer is registered for each --schedule=<frequency> option.

The definition of the systemd units can be inspected in the following files:

~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.service
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@hourly.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@daily.timer
~/.config/systemd/user/timers.target.wants/git-maintenance@weekly.timer

git maintenance start will overwrite these files and start the timer again with systemctl --user, so any customization should be done by creating a drop-in file, i.e. a .conf suffixed file in the ~/.config/systemd/user/git-maintenance@.service.d directory.

git maintenance stop will stop the user systemd timers and delete the above mentioned files.

For more details, see systemd.timer(5).

BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON MACOS SYSTEMS

While macOS technically supports cron, using crontab -e requires elevated privileges and the executed process does not have a full user context. Without a full user context, Git and its credential helpers cannot access stored credentials, so some maintenance tasks are not functional.

Instead, git maintenance start interacts with the launchctl tool, which is the recommended way to schedule timed jobs in macOS. Scheduling maintenance through git maintenance (start|stop) requires some launchctl features available only in macOS 10.11 or later.

Your user-specific scheduled tasks are stored as XML-formatted .plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. You can see the currently-registered tasks using the following command:

$ ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.git-scm.git*
org.git-scm.git.daily.plist
org.git-scm.git.hourly.plist
org.git-scm.git.weekly.plist

One task is registered for each --schedule=<frequency> option. To inspect how the XML format describes each schedule, open one of these .plist files in an editor and inspect the <array> element following the <key>StartCalendarInterval</key> element.

git maintenance start will overwrite these files and register the tasks again with launchctl, so any customizations should be done by creating your own .plist files with distinct names. Similarly, the git maintenance stop command will unregister the tasks with launchctl and delete the .plist files.

To create more advanced customizations to your background tasks, see launchctl.plist(5) for more information.

BACKGROUND MAINTENANCE ON WINDOWS SYSTEMS

Windows does not support cron and instead has its own system for scheduling background tasks. The git maintenance start command uses the schtasks command to submit tasks to this system. You can inspect all background tasks using the Task Scheduler application. The tasks added by Git have names of the form Git Maintenance (<frequency>). The Task Scheduler GUI has ways to inspect these tasks, but you can also export the tasks to XML files and view the details there.

Note that since Git is a console application, these background tasks create a console window visible to the current user. This can be changed manually by selecting the "Run whether user is logged in or not" option in Task Scheduler. This change requires a password input, which is why git maintenance start does not select it by default.

If you want to customize the background tasks, please rename the tasks so future calls to git maintenance (start|stop) do not overwrite your custom tasks.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

maintenance.auto
This boolean config option controls whether some commands run git maintenance run --auto after doing their normal work. Defaults to true.
maintenance.autoDetach

Many Git commands trigger automatic maintenance after they have written data into the repository. This boolean config option controls whether this automatic maintenance shall happen in the foreground or whether the maintenance process shall detach and continue to run in the background.

If unset, the value of gc.autoDetach is used as a fallback. Defaults to true if both are unset, meaning that the maintenance process will detach.

maintenance.strategy

This string config option provides a way to specify one of a few recommended schedules for background maintenance. This only affects which tasks are run during git maintenance run --schedule=X commands, provided no --task=<task> arguments are provided. Further, if a maintenance.<task>.schedule config value is set, then that value is used instead of the one provided by maintenance.strategy. The possible strategy strings are:

  • none: This default setting implies no tasks are run at any schedule.
  • incremental: This setting optimizes for performing small maintenance activities that do not delete any data. This does not schedule the gc task, but runs the prefetch and commit-graph tasks hourly, the loose-objects and incremental-repack tasks daily, and the pack-refs task weekly.
maintenance.<task>.enabled
This boolean config option controls whether the maintenance task with name <task> is run when no --task option is specified to git maintenance run. These config values are ignored if a --task option exists. By default, only maintenance.gc.enabled is true.
maintenance.<task>.schedule
This config option controls whether or not the given <task> runs during a git maintenance run --schedule=<frequency> command. The value must be one of "hourly", "daily", or "weekly".
maintenance.commit-graph.auto
This integer config option controls how often the commit-graph task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the commit-graph task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of reachable commits that are not in the commit-graph file is at least the value of maintenance.commit-graph.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.loose-objects.auto
This integer config option controls how often the loose-objects task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the loose-objects task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of loose objects is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.loose-objects.batchSize
This integer config option controls the maximum number of loose objects written into a packfile during the loose-objects task. The default is fifty thousand. Use value 0 to indicate no limit.
maintenance.incremental-repack.auto
This integer config option controls how often the incremental-repack task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the incremental-repack task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of pack-files not in the multi-pack-index is at least the value of maintenance.incremental-repack.auto. The default value is 10.
maintenance.reflog-expire.auto
This integer config option controls how often the reflog-expire task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the reflog-expire task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of expired reflog entries in the "HEAD" reflog is at least the value of maintenance.loose-objects.auto. The default value is 100.
maintenance.rerere-gc.auto
This integer config option controls how often the rerere-gc task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the rerere-gc task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, any positive value implies the command will run when the "rr-cache" directory exists and has at least one entry, regardless of whether it is stale or not. This heuristic may be refined in the future. The default value is 1.
maintenance.worktree-prune.auto
This integer config option controls how often the worktree-prune task should be run as part of git maintenance run --auto. If zero, then the worktree-prune task will not run with the --auto option. A negative value will force the task to run every time. Otherwise, a positive value implies the command should run when the number of prunable worktrees exceeds the value. The default value is 1.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge-base(1)

NAME

git-merge-base - Find as good common ancestors as possible for a merge

SYNOPSIS

git merge-base [-a | --all] <commit> <commit>…
git merge-base [-a | --all] --octopus <commit>…
git merge-base --is-ancestor <commit> <commit>
git merge-base --independent <commit>…
git merge-base --fork-point <ref> [<commit>]

DESCRIPTION

git merge-base finds the best common ancestor(s) between two commits to use in a three-way merge. One common ancestor is better than another common ancestor if the latter is an ancestor of the former. A common ancestor that does not have any better common ancestor is a best common ancestor, i.e. a merge base. Note that there can be more than one merge base for a pair of commits.

OPERATION MODES

In the most common special case, specifying only two commits on the command line means computing the merge base between the given two commits.

More generally, among the two commits to compute the merge base from, one is specified by the first commit argument on the command line; the other commit is a (possibly hypothetical) commit that is a merge across all the remaining commits on the command line.

As a consequence, the merge base is not necessarily contained in each of the commit arguments if more than two commits are specified. This is different from the section called “git-show-branch(1)” when used with the --merge-base option.

--octopus
Compute the best common ancestors of all supplied commits, in preparation for an n-way merge. This mimics the behavior of git show-branch --merge-base.
--independent
Instead of printing merge bases, print a minimal subset of the supplied commits with the same ancestors. In other words, among the commits given, list those which cannot be reached from any other. This mimics the behavior of git show-branch --independent.
--is-ancestor
Check if the first <commit> is an ancestor of the second <commit>, and exit with status 0 if true, or with status 1 if not. Errors are signaled by a non-zero status that is not 1.
--fork-point
Find the point at which a branch (or any history that leads to <commit>) forked from another branch (or any reference) <ref>. This does not just look for the common ancestor of the two commits, but also takes into account the reflog of <ref> to see if the history leading to <commit> forked from an earlier incarnation of the branch <ref> (see discussion of this mode below).

OPTIONS

-a , --all
Output all merge bases for the commits, instead of just one.

DISCUSSION

Given two commits A and B, git merge-base A B will output a commit which is reachable from both A and B through the parent relationship.

For example, with this topology:

         o---o---o---B
        /
---o---1---o---o---o---A

the merge base between A and B is 1.

Given three commits A, B, and C, git merge-base A B C will compute the merge base between A and a hypothetical commit M, which is a merge between B and C. For example, with this topology:

       o---o---o---o---C
      /
     /   o---o---o---B
    /   /
---2---1---o---o---o---A

the result of git merge-base A B C is 1. This is because the equivalent topology with a merge commit M between B and C is:

       o---o---o---o---o
      /                 \
     /   o---o---o---o---M
    /   /
---2---1---o---o---o---A

and the result of git merge-base A M is 1. Commit 2 is also a common ancestor between A and M, but 1 is a better common ancestor, because 2 is an ancestor of 1. Hence, 2 is not a merge base.

The result of git merge-base --octopus A B C is 2, because 2 is the best common ancestor of all commits.

When the history involves criss-cross merges, there can be more than one best common ancestor for two commits. For example, with this topology:

---1---o---A
    \ /
     X
    / \
---2---o---o---B

both 1 and 2 are merge bases of A and B. Neither one is better than the other (both are best merge bases). When the --all option is not given, it is unspecified which best one is output.

A common idiom to check "fast-forward-ness" between two commits A and B is (or at least used to be) to compute the merge base between A and B, and check if it is the same as A, in which case, A is an ancestor of B. You will see this idiom used often in older scripts.

A=$(git rev-parse --verify A)
if test "$A" = "$(git merge-base A B)"
then
        ... A is an ancestor of B ...
fi

In modern git, you can say this in a more direct way:

if git merge-base --is-ancestor A B
then
        ... A is an ancestor of B ...
fi

instead.

Discussion on fork-point mode

After working on the topic branch created with git switch -c topic origin/master, the history of remote-tracking branch origin/master may have been rewound and rebuilt, leading to a history of this shape:

                 o---B2
                /
---o---o---B1--o---o---o---B (origin/master)
        \
         B0
          \
           D0---D1---D (topic)

where origin/master used to point at commits B0, B1, B2 and now it points at B, and your topic branch was started on top of it back when origin/master was at B0, and you built three commits, D0, D1, and D, on top of it. Imagine that you now want to rebase the work you did on the topic on top of the updated origin/master.

In such a case, git merge-base origin/master topic would return the parent of B0 in the above picture, but B0^..D is not the range of commits you would want to replay on top of B (it includes B0, which is not what you wrote; it is a commit the other side discarded when it moved its tip from B0 to B1).

git merge-base --fork-point origin/master topic is designed to help in such a case. It takes not only B but also B0, B1, and B2 (i.e. old tips of the remote-tracking branches your repository's reflog knows about) into account to see on which commit your topic branch was built and finds B0, allowing you to replay only the commits on your topic, excluding the commits the other side later discarded.

Hence

$ fork_point=$(git merge-base --fork-point origin/master topic)

will find B0, and

$ git rebase --onto origin/master $fork_point topic

will replay D0, D1, and D on top of B to create a new history of this shape:

                 o---B2
                /
---o---o---B1--o---o---o---B (origin/master)
        \                   \
         B0                  D0'--D1'--D' (topic - updated)
          \
           D0---D1---D (topic - old)

A caveat is that older reflog entries in your repository may be expired by git gc. If B0 no longer appears in the reflog of the remote-tracking branch origin/master, the --fork-point mode obviously cannot find it and fails, avoiding to give a random and useless result (such as the parent of B0, like the same command without the --fork-point option gives).

Also, the remote-tracking branch you use the --fork-point mode with must be the one your topic forked from its tip. If you forked from an older commit than the tip, this mode would not find the fork point (imagine in the above sample history B0 did not exist, origin/master started at B1, moved to B2 and then B, and you forked your topic at origin/master^ when origin/master was B1; the shape of the history would be the same as above, without B0, and the parent of B1 is what git merge-base origin/master topic correctly finds, but the --fork-point mode will not, because it is not one of the commits that used to be at the tip of origin/master).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge-file(1)

NAME

git-merge-file - Run a three-way file merge

SYNOPSIS

git merge-file [-L <current-name> [-L <base-name> [-L <other-name>]]]
        [--ours|--theirs|--union] [-p|--stdout] [-q|--quiet] [--marker-size=<n>]
        [--[no-]diff3] [--object-id] <current> <base> <other>

DESCRIPTION

Given three files <current>, <base> and <other>, git merge-file incorporates all changes that lead from <base> to <other> into <current>. The result ordinarily goes into <current>. git merge-file is useful for combining separate changes to an original. Suppose <base> is the original, and both <current> and <other> are modifications of <base>, then git merge-file combines both changes.

A conflict occurs if both <current> and <other> have changes in a common segment of lines. If a conflict is found, git merge-file normally outputs a warning and brackets the conflict with lines containing <<<<<<< and >>>>>>> markers. A typical conflict will look like this:

<<<<<<< A
lines in file A
=======
lines in file B
>>>>>>> B

If there are conflicts, the user should edit the result and delete one of the alternatives. When --ours, --theirs, or --union option is in effect, however, these conflicts are resolved favouring lines from <current>, lines from <other>, or lines from both respectively. The length of the conflict markers can be given with the --marker-size option.

If --object-id is specified, exactly the same behavior occurs, except that instead of specifying what to merge as files, it is specified as a list of object IDs referring to blobs.

The exit value of this program is negative on error, and the number of conflicts otherwise (truncated to 127 if there are more than that many conflicts). If the merge was clean, the exit value is 0.

git merge-file is designed to be a minimal clone of RCS merge; that is, it implements all of RCS merge's functionality which is needed by the section called “git(1)”.

OPTIONS

--object-id

Specify the contents to merge as blobs in the current repository instead of files. In this case, the operation must take place within a valid repository.

If the -p option is specified, the merged file (including conflicts, if any) goes to standard output as normal; otherwise, the merged file is written to the object store and the object ID of its blob is written to standard output.

-L <label>
This option may be given up to three times, and specifies labels to be used in place of the corresponding file names in conflict reports. That is, git merge-file -L x -L y -L z a b c generates output that looks like it came from files x, y and z instead of from files a, b and c.
-p
Send results to standard output instead of overwriting <current>.
-q
Quiet; do not warn about conflicts.
--diff3
Show conflicts in "diff3" style.
--zdiff3
Show conflicts in "zdiff3" style.
--ours , --theirs , --union
Instead of leaving conflicts in the file, resolve conflicts favouring our (or their or both) side of the lines.
--diff-algorithm={patience|minimal|histogram|myers}
Use a different diff algorithm while merging. The current default is "myers", but selecting more recent algorithm such as "histogram" can help avoid mismerges that occur due to unimportant matching lines (such as braces from distinct functions). See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --diff-algorithm.

EXAMPLES

git merge-file README.my README README.upstream
combines the changes of README.my and README.upstream since README, tries to merge them and writes the result into README.my.
git merge-file -L a -L b -L c tmp/a123 tmp/b234 tmp/c345
merges tmp/a123 and tmp/c345 with the base tmp/b234, but uses labels a and c instead of tmp/a123 and tmp/c345.
git merge-file -p --object-id abc1234 def567 890abcd
combines the changes of the blob abc1234 and 890abcd since def567, tries to merge them and writes the result to standard output

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge-index(1)

NAME

git-merge-index - Run a merge for files needing merging

SYNOPSIS

git merge-index [-o] [-q] <merge-program> (-a | ( [--] <file>…) )

DESCRIPTION

This looks up the <file>(s) in the index and, if there are any merge entries, passes the SHA-1 hash for those files as arguments 1, 2, 3 (empty argument if no file), and <file> as argument 4. File modes for the three files are passed as arguments 5, 6 and 7.

OPTIONS

--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
-a
Run merge against all files in the index that need merging.
-o
Instead of stopping at the first failed merge, do all of them in one shot - continue with merging even when previous merges returned errors, and only return the error code after all the merges.
-q
Do not complain about a failed merge program (a merge program failure usually indicates conflicts during the merge). This is for porcelains which might want to emit custom messages.

If git merge-index is called with multiple <file>s (or -a) then it processes them in turn only stopping if merge returns a non-zero exit code.

Typically this is run with a script calling Git's imitation of the merge command from the RCS package.

A sample script called git merge-one-file is included in the distribution.

ALERT ALERT ALERT! The Git "merge object order" is different from the RCS merge program merge object order. In the above ordering, the original is first. But the argument order to the 3-way merge program merge is to have the original in the middle. Don't ask me why.

Examples:

torvalds@ppc970:~/merge-test> git merge-index cat MM
This is MM from the original tree.              # original
This is modified MM in the branch A.            # merge1
This is modified MM in the branch B.            # merge2
This is modified MM in the branch B.            # current contents

or

torvalds@ppc970:~/merge-test> git merge-index cat AA MM
cat: : No such file or directory
This is added AA in the branch A.
This is added AA in the branch B.
This is added AA in the branch B.
fatal: merge program failed

where the latter example shows how git merge-index will stop trying to merge once anything has returned an error (i.e., cat returned an error for the AA file, because it didn't exist in the original, and thus git merge-index didn't even try to merge the MM thing).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge-one-file(1)

NAME

git-merge-one-file - The standard helper program to use with git-merge-index

SYNOPSIS

git merge-one-file

DESCRIPTION

This is the standard helper program to use with git merge-index to resolve a merge after the trivial merge done with git read-tree -m.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge-tree(1)

NAME

git-merge-tree - Perform merge without touching index or working tree

SYNOPSIS

git merge-tree [--write-tree] [<options>] <branch1> <branch2>
git merge-tree [--trivial-merge] <base-tree> <branch1> <branch2> (deprecated)

DESCRIPTION

This command has a modern --write-tree mode and a deprecated --trivial-merge mode. With the exception of the DEPRECATED DESCRIPTION section at the end, the rest of this documentation describes the modern --write-tree mode.

Performs a merge, but does not make any new commits and does not read from or write to either the working tree or index.

The performed merge will use the same features as the "real" the section called “git-merge(1)”, including:

  • three way content merges of individual files
  • rename detection
  • proper directory/file conflict handling
  • recursive ancestor consolidation (i.e. when there is more than one merge base, creating a virtual merge base by merging the merge bases)
  • etc.

After the merge completes, a new toplevel tree object is created. See OUTPUT below for details.

OPTIONS

--stdin
Read the commits to merge from the standard input rather than the command-line. See INPUT FORMAT below for more information. Implies -z.
-z
Do not quote filenames in the <Conflicted file info> section, and end each filename with a NUL character rather than newline. Also begin the messages section with a NUL character instead of a newline. See OUTPUT below for more information.
--name-only
In the Conflicted file info section, instead of writing a list of (mode, oid, stage, path) tuples to output for conflicted files, just provide a list of filenames with conflicts (and do not list filenames multiple times if they have multiple conflicting stages).
--[no-]messages
Write any informational messages such as "Auto-merging <path>" or CONFLICT notices to the end of stdout. If unspecified, the default is to include these messages if there are merge conflicts, and to omit them otherwise.
--quiet
Disable all output from the program. Useful when you are only interested in the exit status. Allows merge-tree to exit early when it finds a conflict, and allows it to avoid writing most objects created by merges.
--allow-unrelated-histories
merge-tree will by default error out if the two branches specified share no common history. This flag can be given to override that check and make the merge proceed anyway.
--merge-base=<tree-ish>

Instead of finding the merge-bases for <branch1> and <branch2>, specify a merge-base for the merge, and specifying multiple bases is currently not supported. This option is incompatible with --stdin.

As the merge-base is provided directly, <branch1> and <branch2> do not need to specify commits; trees are enough.

-X<option> , --strategy-option=<option>
Pass the merge strategy-specific option through to the merge strategy. See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.

OUTPUT

For a successful merge, the output from git-merge-tree is simply one line:

<OID of toplevel tree>

Whereas for a conflicted merge, the output is by default of the form:

<OID of toplevel tree>
<Conflicted file info>
<Informational messages>

These are discussed individually below.

However, there is an exception. If --stdin is passed, then there is an extra section at the beginning, a NUL character at the end, and then all the sections repeat for each line of input. Thus, if the first merge is conflicted and the second is clean, the output would be of the form:

<Merge status>
<OID of toplevel tree>
<Conflicted file info>
<Informational messages>
NUL
<Merge status>
<OID of toplevel tree>
NUL

Merge status

This is an integer status followed by a NUL character. The integer status is:

0: merge had conflicts
1: merge was clean

OID of toplevel tree

This is a tree object that represents what would be checked out in the working tree at the end of git merge. If there were conflicts, then files within this tree may have embedded conflict markers. This section is always followed by a newline (or NUL if -z is passed).

Conflicted file info

This is a sequence of lines with the format

<mode> <object> <stage> <filename>

The filename will be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). However, if the --name-only option is passed, the mode, object, and stage will be omitted. If -z is passed, the "lines" are terminated by a NUL character instead of a newline character.

Informational messages

This section provides informational messages, typically about conflicts. The format of the section varies significantly depending on whether -z is passed.

If -z is passed:

The output format is zero or more conflict informational records, each of the form:

<list-of-paths><conflict-type>NUL<conflict-message>NUL

where <list-of-paths> is of the form

<number-of-paths>NUL<path1>NUL<path2>NUL...<pathN>NUL

and includes paths (or branch names) affected by the conflict or informational message in <conflict-message>. Also, <conflict-type> is a stable string explaining the type of conflict, such as

  • "Auto-merging"
  • "CONFLICT (rename/delete)"
  • "CONFLICT (submodule lacks merge base)"
  • "CONFLICT (binary)"

and <conflict-message> is a more detailed message about the conflict which often (but not always) embeds the <stable-short-type-description> within it. These strings may change in future Git versions. Some examples:

  • "Auto-merging <file>"
  • "CONFLICT (rename/delete): <oldfile> renamed…but deleted in…"
  • "Failed to merge submodule <submodule> (no merge base)"
  • "Warning: cannot merge binary files: <filename>"

If -z is NOT passed:

This section starts with a blank line to separate it from the previous sections, and then only contains the <conflict-message> information from the previous section (separated by newlines). These are non-stable strings that should not be parsed by scripts, and are just meant for human consumption. Also, note that while <conflict-message> strings usually do not contain embedded newlines, they sometimes do. (However, the free-form messages will never have an embedded NUL character). So, the entire block of information is meant for human readers as an agglomeration of all conflict messages.

EXIT STATUS

For a successful, non-conflicted merge, the exit status is 0. When the merge has conflicts, the exit status is 1. If the merge is not able to complete (or start) due to some kind of error, the exit status is something other than 0 or 1 (and the output is unspecified). When --stdin is passed, the return status is 0 for both successful and conflicted merges, and something other than 0 or 1 if it cannot complete all the requested merges.

USAGE NOTES

This command is intended as low-level plumbing, similar to the section called “git-hash-object(1)”, the section called “git-mktree(1)”, the section called “git-commit-tree(1)”, the section called “git-write-tree(1)”, the section called “git-update-ref(1)”, and the section called “git-mktag(1)”. Thus, it can be used as a part of a series of steps such as:

vi message.txt
BRANCH1=refs/heads/test
BRANCH2=main
NEWTREE=$(git merge-tree --write-tree $BRANCH1 $BRANCH2) || {
    echo "There were conflicts..." 1>&2
    exit 1
}
NEWCOMMIT=$(git commit-tree $NEWTREE -F message.txt \
    -p $BRANCH1 -p $BRANCH2)
git update-ref $BRANCH1 $NEWCOMMIT

Note that when the exit status is non-zero, NEWTREE in this sequence will contain a lot more output than just a tree.

For conflicts, the output includes the same information that you'd get with the section called “git-merge(1)”:

INPUT FORMAT

git merge-tree --stdin input format is fully text based. Each line has this format:

[<base-commit> -- ]<branch1> <branch2>

If one line is separated by --, the string before the separator is used for specifying a merge-base for the merge and the string after the separator describes the branches to be merged.

MISTAKES TO AVOID

Do NOT look through the resulting toplevel tree to try to find which files conflict; parse the Conflicted file info section instead. Not only would parsing an entire tree be horrendously slow in large repositories, there are numerous types of conflicts not representable by conflict markers (modify/delete, mode conflict, binary file changed on both sides, file/directory conflicts, various rename conflict permutations, etc.)

Do NOT interpret an empty Conflicted file info list as a clean merge; check the exit status. A merge can have conflicts without having individual files conflict (there are a few types of directory rename conflicts that fall into this category, and others might also be added in the future).

Do NOT attempt to guess or make the user guess the conflict types from the Conflicted file info list. The information there is insufficient to do so. For example: Rename/rename(1to2) conflicts (both sides renamed the same file differently) will result in three different files having higher order stages (but each only has one higher order stage), with no way (short of the Informational messages section) to determine which three files are related. File/directory conflicts also result in a file with exactly one higher order stage. Possibly-involved-in-directory-rename conflicts (when "merge.directoryRenames" is unset or set to "conflicts") also result in a file with exactly one higher order stage. In all cases, the Informational messages section has the necessary info, though it is not designed to be machine parseable.

Do NOT assume that each path from Conflicted file info, and the logical conflicts in the Informational messages have a one-to-one mapping, nor that there is a one-to-many mapping, nor a many-to-one mapping. Many-to-many mappings exist, meaning that each path can have many logical conflict types in a single merge, and each logical conflict type can affect many paths.

Do NOT assume all filenames listed in the Informational messages section had conflicts. Messages can be included for files that have no conflicts, such as "Auto-merging <file>".

AVOID taking the OIDS from the Conflicted file info and re-merging them to present the conflicts to the user. This will lose information. Instead, look up the version of the file found within the OID of toplevel tree and show that instead. In particular, the latter will have conflict markers annotated with the original branch/commit being merged and, if renames were involved, the original filename. While you could include the original branch/commit in the conflict marker annotations when re-merging, the original filename is not available from the Conflicted file info and thus you would be losing information that might help the user resolve the conflict.

DEPRECATED DESCRIPTION

Per the DESCRIPTION and unlike the rest of this documentation, this section describes the deprecated --trivial-merge mode.

Other than the optional --trivial-merge, this mode accepts no options.

This mode reads three tree-ish, and outputs trivial merge results and conflicting stages to the standard output in a semi-diff format. Since this was designed for higher level scripts to consume and merge the results back into the index, it omits entries that match <branch1>. The result of this second form is similar to what three-way git read-tree -m does, but instead of storing the results in the index, the command outputs the entries to the standard output.

This form not only has limited applicability (a trivial merge cannot handle content merges of individual files, rename detection, proper directory/file conflict handling, etc.), the output format is also difficult to work with, and it will generally be less performant than the first form even on successful merges (especially if working in large repositories).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-merge(1)

NAME

git-merge - Join two or more development histories together

SYNOPSIS

git merge [-n] [--stat] [--no-commit] [--squash] [--[no-]edit]
        [--no-verify] [-s <strategy>] [-X <strategy-option>] [-S[<keyid>]]
        [--[no-]allow-unrelated-histories]
        [--[no-]rerere-autoupdate] [-m <msg>] [-F <file>]
        [--into-name <branch>] [<commit>]
git merge (--continue | --abort | --quit)

DESCRIPTION

Incorporates changes from the named commits (since the time their histories diverged from the current branch) into the current branch. This command is used by git pull to incorporate changes from another repository and can be used by hand to merge changes from one branch into another.

Assume the following history exists and the current branch is master:

          A---B---C topic
         /
    D---E---F---G master

Then git merge topic will replay the changes made on the topic branch since it diverged from master (i.e., E) until its current commit (C) on top of master, and record the result in a new commit along with the names of the two parent commits and a log message from the user describing the changes. Before the operation, ORIG_HEAD is set to the tip of the current branch (C).

          A---B---C topic
         /         \
    D---E---F---G---H master

A merge stops if there's a conflict that cannot be resolved automatically or if --no-commit was provided when initiating the merge. At that point you can run git merge --abort or git merge --continue.

git merge --abort will abort the merge process and try to reconstruct the pre-merge state. However, if there were uncommitted changes when the merge started (and especially if those changes were further modified after the merge was started), git merge --abort will in some cases be unable to reconstruct the original (pre-merge) changes. Therefore:

Warning

Running git merge with non-trivial uncommitted changes is discouraged: while possible, it may leave you in a state that is hard to back out of in the case of a conflict.

OPTIONS

--commit , --no-commit

Perform the merge and commit the result. This option can be used to override --no-commit.

With --no-commit perform the merge and stop just before creating a merge commit, to give the user a chance to inspect and further tweak the merge result before committing.

Note that fast-forward updates do not create a merge commit and therefore there is no way to stop those merges with --no-commit. Thus, if you want to ensure your branch is not changed or updated by the merge command, use --no-ff with --no-commit.

--edit , -e , --no-edit

Invoke an editor before committing successful mechanical merge to further edit the auto-generated merge message, so that the user can explain and justify the merge. The --no-edit option can be used to accept the auto-generated message (this is generally discouraged). The --edit (or -e) option is still useful if you are giving a draft message with the -m option from the command line and want to edit it in the editor.

Older scripts may depend on the historical behaviour of not allowing the user to edit the merge log message. They will see an editor opened when they run git merge. To make it easier to adjust such scripts to the updated behaviour, the environment variable GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT can be set to no at the beginning of them.

--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines how the merge message will be cleaned up before committing. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for more details. In addition, if the <mode> is given a value of scissors, scissors will be appended to MERGE_MSG before being passed on to the commit machinery in the case of a merge conflict.
--ff , --no-ff , --ff-only

Specifies how a merge is handled when the merged-in history is already a descendant of the current history. --ff is the default unless merging an annotated (and possibly signed) tag that is not stored in its natural place in the refs/tags/ hierarchy, in which case --no-ff is assumed.

With --ff, when possible resolve the merge as a fast-forward (only update the branch pointer to match the merged branch; do not create a merge commit). When not possible (when the merged-in history is not a descendant of the current history), create a merge commit.

With --no-ff, create a merge commit in all cases, even when the merge could instead be resolved as a fast-forward.

With --ff-only, resolve the merge as a fast-forward when possible. When not possible, refuse to merge and exit with a non-zero status.

-S[<key-id>] , --gpg-sign[=<key-id>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign the resulting merge commit. The <key-id> argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
--log[=<n>] , --no-log

In addition to branch names, populate the log message with one-line descriptions from at most <n> actual commits that are being merged. See also the section called “git-fmt-merge-msg(1)”.

With --no-log do not list one-line descriptions from the actual commits being merged.

--signoff , --no-signoff

Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project to which you're committing. For example, it may certify that the committer has the rights to submit the work under the project's license or agrees to some contributor representation, such as a Developer Certificate of Origin. (See https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the Linux kernel and Git projects.) Consult the documentation or leadership of the project to which you're contributing to understand how the signoffs are used in that project.

The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff option on the command line.

--stat , -n , --no-stat

Show a diffstat at the end of the merge. The diffstat is also controlled by the configuration option merge.stat.

With -n or --no-stat do not show a diffstat at the end of the merge.

--squash , --no-squash

Produce the working tree and index state as if a real merge happened (except for the merge information), but do not actually make a commit, move the HEAD, or record $GIT_DIR/MERGE_HEAD (to cause the next git commit command to create a merge commit). This allows you to create a single commit on top of the current branch whose effect is the same as merging another branch (or more in case of an octopus).

With --no-squash perform the merge and commit the result. This option can be used to override --squash.

With --squash, --commit is not allowed, and will fail.

--[no-]verify
By default, the pre-merge and commit-msg hooks are run. When --no-verify is given, these are bypassed. See also the section called “githooks(5)”.
-s <strategy> , --strategy=<strategy>
Use the given merge strategy; can be supplied more than once to specify them in the order they should be tried. If there is no -s option, a built-in list of strategies is used instead (ort when merging a single head, octopus otherwise).
-X <option> , --strategy-option=<option>
Pass merge strategy specific option through to the merge strategy.
--verify-signatures , --no-verify-signatures
Verify that the tip commit of the side branch being merged is signed with a valid key, i.e. a key that has a valid uid: in the default trust model, this means the signing key has been signed by a trusted key. If the tip commit of the side branch is not signed with a valid key, the merge is aborted.
--summary , --no-summary
Synonyms to --stat and --no-stat; these are deprecated and will be removed in the future.
-q , --quiet
Operate quietly. Implies --no-progress.
-v , --verbose
Be verbose.
--progress , --no-progress
Turn progress on/off explicitly. If neither is specified, progress is shown if standard error is connected to a terminal. Note that not all merge strategies may support progress reporting.
--autostash , --no-autostash
Automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, record it in the ref MERGE_AUTOSTASH and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run the operation on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts.
--allow-unrelated-histories
By default, git merge command refuses to merge histories that do not share a common ancestor. This option can be used to override this safety when merging histories of two projects that started their lives independently. As that is a very rare occasion, no configuration variable to enable this by default exists or will be added.
-m <msg>

Set the commit message to be used for the merge commit (in case one is created).

If --log is specified, a shortlog of the commits being merged will be appended to the specified message.

The git fmt-merge-msg command can be used to give a good default for automated git merge invocations. The automated message can include the branch description.

--into-name <branch>
Prepare the default merge message as if merging to the branch <branch>, instead of the name of the real branch to which the merge is made.
-F <file> , --file=<file>

Read the commit message to be used for the merge commit (in case one is created).

If --log is specified, a shortlog of the commits being merged will be appended to the specified message.

--rerere-autoupdate , --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to also update the index with the result of resolution. --no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what rerere did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the result to the index with a separate git add.
--overwrite-ignore , --no-overwrite-ignore
Silently overwrite ignored files from the merge result. This is the default behavior. Use --no-overwrite-ignore to abort.
--abort

Abort the current conflict resolution process, and try to reconstruct the pre-merge state. If an autostash entry is present, apply it to the worktree.

If there were uncommitted worktree changes present when the merge started, git merge --abort will in some cases be unable to reconstruct these changes. It is therefore recommended to always commit or stash your changes before running git merge.

git merge --abort is equivalent to git reset --merge when MERGE_HEAD is present unless MERGE_AUTOSTASH is also present in which case git merge --abort applies the stash entry to the worktree whereas git reset --merge will save the stashed changes in the stash list.

--quit
Forget about the current merge in progress. Leave the index and the working tree as-is. If MERGE_AUTOSTASH is present, the stash entry will be saved to the stash list.
--continue
After a git merge stops due to conflicts you can conclude the merge by running git merge --continue (see "HOW TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS" section below).
<commit>...

Commits, usually other branch heads, to merge into our branch. Specifying more than one commit will create a merge with more than two parents (affectionately called an Octopus merge).

If no commit is given from the command line, merge the remote-tracking branches that the current branch is configured to use as its upstream. See also the configuration section of this manual page.

When FETCH_HEAD (and no other commit) is specified, the branches recorded in the .git/FETCH_HEAD file by the previous invocation of git fetch for merging are merged to the current branch.

PRE-MERGE CHECKS

Before applying outside changes, you should get your own work in good shape and committed locally, so it will not be clobbered if there are conflicts. See also the section called “git-stash(1)”. git pull and git merge will stop without doing anything when local uncommitted changes overlap with files that git pull/git merge may need to update.

To avoid recording unrelated changes in the merge commit, git pull and git merge will also abort if there are any changes registered in the index relative to the HEAD commit. (Special narrow exceptions to this rule may exist depending on which merge strategy is in use, but generally, the index must match HEAD.)

If all named commits are already ancestors of HEAD, git merge will exit early with the message "Already up to date."

FAST-FORWARD MERGE

Often the current branch head is an ancestor of the named commit. This is the most common case especially when invoked from git pull: you are tracking an upstream repository, you have committed no local changes, and now you want to update to a newer upstream revision. In this case, a new commit is not needed to store the combined history; instead, the HEAD (along with the index) is updated to point at the named commit, without creating an extra merge commit.

This behavior can be suppressed with the --no-ff option.

TRUE MERGE

Except in a fast-forward merge (see above), the branches to be merged must be tied together by a merge commit that has both of them as its parents.

A merged version reconciling the changes from all branches to be merged is committed, and your HEAD, index, and working tree are updated to it. It is possible to have modifications in the working tree as long as they do not overlap; the update will preserve them.

When it is not obvious how to reconcile the changes, the following happens:

  1. The HEAD pointer stays the same.
  2. The MERGE_HEAD ref is set to point to the other branch head.
  3. Paths that merged cleanly are updated both in the index file and in your working tree.
  4. For conflicting paths, the index file records up to three versions: stage 1 stores the version from the common ancestor, stage 2 from HEAD, and stage 3 from MERGE_HEAD (you can inspect the stages with git ls-files -u). The working tree files contain the result of the merge operation; i.e. 3-way merge results with familiar conflict markers <<< === >>>.
  5. A ref named AUTO_MERGE is written, pointing to a tree corresponding to the current content of the working tree (including conflict markers for textual conflicts). Note that this ref is only written when the ort merge strategy is used (the default).
  6. No other changes are made. In particular, the local modifications you had before you started merge will stay the same and the index entries for them stay as they were, i.e. matching HEAD.

If you tried a merge which resulted in complex conflicts and want to start over, you can recover with git merge --abort.

MERGING TAG

When merging an annotated (and possibly signed) tag, Git always creates a merge commit even if a fast-forward merge is possible, and the commit message template is prepared with the tag message. Additionally, if the tag is signed, the signature check is reported as a comment in the message template. See also the section called “git-tag(1)”.

When you want to just integrate with the work leading to the commit that happens to be tagged, e.g. synchronizing with an upstream release point, you may not want to make an unnecessary merge commit.

In such a case, you can "unwrap" the tag yourself before feeding it to git merge, or pass --ff-only when you do not have any work on your own. e.g.

git fetch origin
git merge v1.2.3^0
git merge --ff-only v1.2.3

HOW CONFLICTS ARE PRESENTED

During a merge, the working tree files are updated to reflect the result of the merge. Among the changes made to the common ancestor's version, non-overlapping ones (that is, you changed an area of the file while the other side left that area intact, or vice versa) are incorporated in the final result verbatim. When both sides made changes to the same area, however, Git cannot randomly pick one side over the other, and asks you to resolve it by leaving what both sides did to that area.

By default, Git uses the same style as the one used by the "merge" program from the RCS suite to present such a conflicted hunk, like this:

Here are lines that are either unchanged from the common
ancestor, or cleanly resolved because only one side changed,
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed the same way.
<<<<<<< yours:sample.txt
Conflict resolution is hard;
let's go shopping.
=======
Git makes conflict resolution easy.
>>>>>>> theirs:sample.txt
And here is another line that is cleanly resolved or unmodified.

The area where a pair of conflicting changes happened is marked with markers <<<<<<<, =======, and >>>>>>>. The part before the ======= is typically your side, and the part afterwards is typically their side.

The default format does not show what the original said in the conflicting area. You cannot tell how many lines are deleted and replaced with Barbie's remark on your side. The only thing you can tell is that your side wants to say it is hard and you'd prefer to go shopping, while the other side wants to claim it is easy.

An alternative style can be used by setting the merge.conflictStyle configuration variable to either diff3 or zdiff3. In diff3 style, the above conflict may look like this:

Here are lines that are either unchanged from the common
ancestor, or cleanly resolved because only one side changed,
<<<<<<< yours:sample.txt
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed the same way.
Conflict resolution is hard;
let's go shopping.
||||||| base:sample.txt
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed identically.
Conflict resolution is hard.
=======
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed the same way.
Git makes conflict resolution easy.
>>>>>>> theirs:sample.txt
And here is another line that is cleanly resolved or unmodified.

while in zdiff3 style, it may look like this:

Here are lines that are either unchanged from the common
ancestor, or cleanly resolved because only one side changed,
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed the same way.
<<<<<<< yours:sample.txt
Conflict resolution is hard;
let's go shopping.
||||||| base:sample.txt
or cleanly resolved because both sides changed identically.
Conflict resolution is hard.
=======
Git makes conflict resolution easy.
>>>>>>> theirs:sample.txt
And here is another line that is cleanly resolved or unmodified.

In addition to the <<<<<<<, =======, and >>>>>>> markers, it uses another ||||||| marker that is followed by the original text. You can tell that the original just stated a fact, and your side simply gave in to that statement and gave up, while the other side tried to have a more positive attitude. You can sometimes come up with a better resolution by viewing the original.

HOW TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS

After seeing a conflict, you can do two things:

  • Decide not to merge. The only clean-ups you need are to reset the index file to the HEAD commit to reverse 2. and to clean up working tree changes made by 2. and 3.; git merge --abort can be used for this.
  • Resolve the conflicts. Git will mark the conflicts in the working tree. Edit the files into shape and git add them to the index. Use git commit or git merge --continue to seal the deal. The latter command checks whether there is a (interrupted) merge in progress before calling git commit.

You can work through the conflict with a number of tools:

  • Use a mergetool. git mergetool to launch a graphical mergetool which will work through the merge with you.
  • Look at the diffs. git diff will show a three-way diff, highlighting changes from both the HEAD and MERGE_HEAD versions. git diff AUTO_MERGE will show what changes you've made so far to resolve textual conflicts.
  • Look at the diffs from each branch. git log --merge -p <path> will show diffs first for the HEAD version and then the MERGE_HEAD version.
  • Look at the originals. git show :1:filename shows the common ancestor, git show :2:filename shows the HEAD version, and git show :3:filename shows the MERGE_HEAD version.

EXAMPLES

  • Merge branches fixes and enhancements on top of the current branch, making an octopus merge:

    $ git merge fixes enhancements
  • Merge branch obsolete into the current branch, using ours merge strategy:

    $ git merge -s ours obsolete
  • Merge branch maint into the current branch, but do not make a new commit automatically:

    $ git merge --no-commit maint

    This can be used when you want to include further changes to the merge, or want to write your own merge commit message.

    You should refrain from abusing this option to sneak substantial changes into a merge commit. Small fixups like bumping release/version name would be acceptable.

MERGE STRATEGIES

The merge mechanism (git merge and git pull commands) allows the backend merge strategies to be chosen with -s option. Some strategies can also take their own options, which can be passed by giving -X<option> arguments to git merge and/or git pull.

ort

This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch. This strategy can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm. When there is more than one common ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mismerges by tests done on actual merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this strategy can detect and handle merges involving renames. It does not make use of detected copies. The name for this algorithm is an acronym ("Ostensibly Recursive's Twin") and came from the fact that it was written as a replacement for the previous default algorithm, recursive.

In the case where the path is a submodule, if the submodule commit used on one side of the merge is a descendant of the submodule commit used on the other side of the merge, Git attempts to fast-forward to the descendant. Otherwise, Git will treat this case as a conflict, suggesting as a resolution a submodule commit that is descendant of the conflicting ones, if one exists.

The ort strategy can take the following options:

ours

This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by favoring our version. Changes from the other tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected in the merge result. For a binary file, the entire contents are taken from our side.

This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy, which does not even look at what the other tree contains at all. It discards everything the other tree did, declaring our history contains all that happened in it.

theirs
This is the opposite of ours; note that, unlike ours, there is no theirs merge strategy to confuse this merge option with.
ignore-space-change , ignore-all-space , ignore-space-at-eol , ignore-cr-at-eol

Treats lines with the indicated type of whitespace change as unchanged for the sake of a three-way merge. Whitespace changes mixed with other changes to a line are not ignored. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” -b, -w, --ignore-space-at-eol, and --ignore-cr-at-eol.

  • If their version only introduces whitespace changes to a line, our version is used;
  • If our version introduces whitespace changes but their version includes a substantial change, their version is used;
  • Otherwise, the merge proceeds in the usual way.
renormalize
This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages of any file which needs a three-way merge. This option is meant to be used when merging branches with different clean filters or end-of-line normalization rules. See "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
no-renormalize
Disables the renormalize option. This overrides the merge.renormalize configuration variable.
find-renames[=<n>]
Turn on rename detection, optionally setting the similarity threshold. This is the default. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --find-renames.
rename-threshold=<n>
Deprecated synonym for find-renames=<n>.
no-renames
Turn off rename detection. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --no-renames.
histogram
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=histogram.
patience
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=patience.
diff-algorithm=(histogram|minimal|myers|patience)
Use a different diff algorithm while merging, which can help avoid mismerges that occur due to unimportant matching lines (such as braces from distinct functions). See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --diff-algorithm. Note that ort defaults to diff-algorithm=histogram, while regular diffs currently default to the diff.algorithm config setting.
subtree[=<path>]
This option is a more advanced form of subtree strategy, where the strategy makes a guess on how two trees must be shifted to match with each other when merging. Instead, the specified path is prefixed (or stripped from the beginning) to make the shape of two trees to match.
recursive
This is now a synonym for ort. It was an alternative implementation until v2.49.0, but was redirected to mean ort in v2.50.0. The previous recursive strategy was the default strategy for resolving two heads from Git v0.99.9k until v2.33.0.
resolve
This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and another branch you pulled from) using a 3-way merge algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge ambiguities. It does not handle renames.
octopus
This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do a complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads together. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than one branch.
ours
This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note that this is different from the -Xours option to the ort merge strategy.
subtree
This is a modified ort strategy. When merging trees A and B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common ancestor tree.

With the strategies that use 3-way merge (including the default, ort), if a change is made on both branches, but later reverted on one of the branches, that change will be present in the merged result; some people find this behavior confusing. It occurs because only the heads and the merge base are considered when performing a merge, not the individual commits. The merge algorithm therefore considers the reverted change as no change at all, and substitutes the changed version instead.

CONFIGURATION

branch.<name>.mergeOptions
Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of git merge, but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

merge.conflictStyle
Specify the style in which conflicted hunks are written out to working tree files upon merge. The default is "merge", which shows a <<<<<<< conflict marker, changes made by one side, a ======= marker, changes made by the other side, and then a >>>>>>> marker. An alternate style, "diff3", adds a ||||||| marker and the original text before the ======= marker. The "merge" style tends to produce smaller conflict regions than diff3, both because of the exclusion of the original text, and because when a subset of lines match on the two sides, they are just pulled out of the conflict region. Another alternate style, "zdiff3", is similar to diff3 but removes matching lines on the two sides from the conflict region when those matching lines appear near either the beginning or end of a conflict region.
merge.defaultToUpstream
If merge is called without any commit argument, merge the upstream branches configured for the current branch by using their last observed values stored in their remote-tracking branches. The values of the branch.<current branch>.merge that name the branches at the remote named by branch.<current-branch>.remote are consulted, and then they are mapped via remote.<remote>.fetch to their corresponding remote-tracking branches, and the tips of these tracking branches are merged. Defaults to true.
merge.ff
By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line).
merge.verifySignatures
If true, this is equivalent to the --verify-signatures command line option. See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
merge.branchdesc
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with the branch description text associated with them. Defaults to false.
merge.log
In addition to branch names, populate the log message with at most the specified number of one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged. Defaults to false, and true is a synonym for 20.
merge.suppressDest

By adding a glob that matches the names of integration branches to this multi-valued configuration variable, the default merge message computed for merges into these integration branches will omit "into <branch-name>" from its title.

An element with an empty value can be used to clear the list of globs accumulated from previous configuration entries. When there is no merge.suppressDest variable defined, the default value of master is used for backward compatibility.

merge.renameLimit
The number of files to consider in the exhaustive portion of rename detection during a merge. If not specified, defaults to the value of diff.renameLimit. If neither merge.renameLimit nor diff.renameLimit are specified, currently defaults to 7000. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.
merge.renames
Whether Git detects renames. If set to false, rename detection is disabled. If set to true, basic rename detection is enabled. Defaults to the value of diff.renames.
merge.directoryRenames

Whether Git detects directory renames, affecting what happens at merge time to new files added to a directory on one side of history when that directory was renamed on the other side of history. Possible values are:

false
Directory rename detection is disabled, meaning that such new files will be left behind in the old directory.
true
Directory rename detection is enabled, meaning that such new files will be moved into the new directory.
conflict
A conflict will be reported for such paths.

If merge.renames is false, merge.directoryRenames is ignored and treated as false. Defaults to conflict.

merge.renormalize
Tell Git that canonical representation of files in the repository has changed over time (e.g. earlier commits record text files with CRLF line endings, but recent ones use LF line endings). In such a repository, for each file where a three-way content merge is needed, Git can convert the data recorded in commits to a canonical form before performing a merge to reduce unnecessary conflicts. For more information, see section "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”.
merge.stat
Whether to print the diffstat between ORIG_HEAD and the merge result at the end of the merge. True by default.
merge.autoStash
When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run merge on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts. This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of the section called “git-merge(1)”. Defaults to false.
merge.tool
Controls which merge tool is used by the section called “git-mergetool(1)”. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.
merge.guitool

Controls which merge tool is used by the section called “git-mergetool(1)” when the -g/--gui flag is specified. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
Use Araxis Merge (requires a graphical session)
bc
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc3
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
bc4
Use Beyond Compare (requires a graphical session)
codecompare
Use Code Compare (requires a graphical session)
deltawalker
Use DeltaWalker (requires a graphical session)
diffmerge
Use DiffMerge (requires a graphical session)
diffuse
Use Diffuse (requires a graphical session)
ecmerge
Use ECMerge (requires a graphical session)
emerge
Use Emacs' Emerge
examdiff
Use ExamDiff Pro (requires a graphical session)
guiffy
Use Guiffy's Diff Tool (requires a graphical session)
gvimdiff
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
gvimdiff1
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
gvimdiff2
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
gvimdiff3
Use gVim (requires a graphical session) where only the MERGED file is shown
kdiff3
Use KDiff3 (requires a graphical session)
meld
Use Meld (requires a graphical session) with optional auto merge (see git help mergetool's CONFIGURATION section)
nvimdiff
Use Neovim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
nvimdiff1
Use Neovim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
nvimdiff2
Use Neovim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
nvimdiff3
Use Neovim where only the MERGED file is shown
opendiff
Use FileMerge (requires a graphical session)
p4merge
Use HelixCore P4Merge (requires a graphical session)
smerge
Use Sublime Merge (requires a graphical session)
tkdiff
Use TkDiff (requires a graphical session)
tortoisemerge
Use TortoiseMerge (requires a graphical session)
vimdiff
Use Vim with a custom layout (see git help mergetool's BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section)
vimdiff1
Use Vim with a 2 panes layout (LOCAL and REMOTE)
vimdiff2
Use Vim with a 3 panes layout (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE)
vimdiff3
Use Vim where only the MERGED file is shown
vscode
Use Visual Studio Code (requires a graphical session)
winmerge
Use WinMerge (requires a graphical session)
xxdiff
Use xxdiff (requires a graphical session)
merge.verbosity
Controls the amount of output shown by the recursive merge strategy. Level 0 outputs nothing except a final error message if conflicts were detected. Level 1 outputs only conflicts, 2 outputs conflicts and file changes. Level 5 and above outputs debugging information. The default is level 2. Can be overridden by the GIT_MERGE_VERBOSITY environment variable.
merge.<driver>.name
Defines a human-readable name for a custom low-level merge driver. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
merge.<driver>.driver
Defines the command that implements a custom low-level merge driver. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
merge.<driver>.recursive
Names a low-level merge driver to be used when performing an internal merge between common ancestors. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mergetool--lib(1)

NAME

git-mergetool--lib - Common Git merge tool shell scriptlets

SYNOPSIS

TOOL_MODE=(diff|merge) . "$(git --exec-path)/git-mergetool--lib"

DESCRIPTION

This is not a command the end user would want to run. Ever. This documentation is meant for people who are studying the Porcelain-ish scripts and/or are writing new ones.

The git-mergetool--lib scriptlet is designed to be sourced (using .) by other shell scripts to set up functions for working with Git merge tools.

Before sourcing git-mergetool--lib, your script must set TOOL_MODE to define the operation mode for the functions listed below. diff and merge are valid values.

FUNCTIONS

get_merge_tool
Returns a merge tool. The return code is 1 if we returned a guessed merge tool, else 0. $GIT_MERGETOOL_GUI may be set to true to search for the appropriate guitool.
get_merge_tool_cmd
Returns the custom command for a merge tool.
get_merge_tool_path
Returns the custom path for a merge tool.
initialize_merge_tool
Brings merge tool specific functions into scope so they can be used or overridden.
run_merge_tool
Launches a merge tool given the tool name and a true/false flag to indicate whether a merge base is present. $MERGED, $LOCAL, $REMOTE, and $BASE must be defined for use by the merge tool.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mergetool(1)

NAME

git-mergetool - Run merge conflict resolution tools to resolve merge conflicts

SYNOPSIS

git mergetool [--tool=<tool>] [-y | --[no-]prompt] [<file>]

DESCRIPTION

Use git mergetool to run one of several merge utilities to resolve merge conflicts. It is typically run after git merge.

If one or more <file> parameters are given, the merge tool program will be run to resolve differences in each file (skipping those without conflicts). Specifying a directory will include all unresolved files in that path. If no <file> names are specified, git mergetool will run the merge tool program on every file with merge conflicts.

OPTIONS

-t <tool> , --tool=<tool>

Use the merge resolution program specified by <tool>. Valid values include emerge, gvimdiff, kdiff3, meld, vimdiff, and tortoisemerge. Run git mergetool --tool-help for the list of valid <tool> settings.

If a merge resolution program is not specified, git mergetool will use the configuration variable merge.tool. If the configuration variable merge.tool is not set, git mergetool will pick a suitable default.

You can explicitly provide a full path to the tool by setting the configuration variable mergetool.<tool>.path. For example, you can configure the absolute path to kdiff3 by setting mergetool.kdiff3.path. Otherwise, git mergetool assumes the tool is available in $PATH.

Instead of running one of the known merge tool programs, git mergetool can be customized to run an alternative program by specifying the command line to invoke in a configuration variable mergetool.<tool>.cmd.

When git mergetool is invoked with this tool (either through the -t or --tool option or the merge.tool configuration variable), the configured command line will be invoked with BASE set to the name of a temporary file containing the common base for the merge, if available; LOCAL set to the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file on the current branch; REMOTE set to the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file to be merged, and MERGED set to the name of the file to which the merge tool should write the result of the merge resolution.

If the custom merge tool correctly indicates the success of a merge resolution with its exit code, then the configuration variable mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode can be set to true. Otherwise, git mergetool will prompt the user to indicate the success of the resolution after the custom tool has exited.

--tool-help
Print a list of merge tools that may be used with --tool.
-y , --no-prompt
Don't prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program. This is the default if the merge resolution program is explicitly specified with the --tool option or with the merge.tool configuration variable.
--prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program to give the user a chance to skip the path.
-g , --gui
When git-mergetool is invoked with the -g or --gui option, the default merge tool will be read from the configured merge.guitool variable instead of merge.tool. If merge.guitool is not set, we will fallback to the tool configured under merge.tool. This may be autoselected using the configuration variable mergetool.guiDefault.
--no-gui
This overrides a previous -g or --gui setting or mergetool.guiDefault configuration and reads the default merge tool from the configured merge.tool variable.
-O<orderfile>
Process files in the order specified in the <orderfile>, which has one shell glob pattern per line. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

mergetool.<tool>.path
Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the $PATH.
mergetool.<tool>.cmd
Specify the command to invoke the specified merge tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: BASE is the name of a temporary file containing the common base of the files to be merged, if available; LOCAL is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file on the current branch; REMOTE is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file from the branch being merged; MERGED contains the name of the file to which the merge tool should write the results of a successful merge.
mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved
Allows the user to override the global mergetool.hideResolved value for a specific tool. See mergetool.hideResolved for the full description.
mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode
For a custom merge command, specify whether the exit code of the merge command can be used to determine whether the merge was successful. If this is not set to true then the merge target file timestamp is checked, and the merge is assumed to have been successful if the file has been updated; otherwise, the user is prompted to indicate the success of the merge.
mergetool.meld.hasOutput
Older versions of meld do not support the --output option. Git will attempt to detect whether meld supports --output by inspecting the output of meld --help. Configuring mergetool.meld.hasOutput will make Git skip these checks and use the configured value instead. Setting mergetool.meld.hasOutput to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --output option, and false avoids using --output.
mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge
When the --auto-merge is given, meld will merge all non-conflicting parts automatically, highlight the conflicting parts, and wait for user decision. Setting mergetool.meld.useAutoMerge to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --auto-merge option with meld. Setting this value to auto makes git detect whether --auto-merge is supported and will only use --auto-merge when available. A value of false avoids using --auto-merge altogether, and is the default value.
mergetool.<variant>.layout
Configure the split window layout for vimdiff's <variant>, which is any of vimdiff, nvimdiff, gvimdiff. Upon launching git mergetool with --tool=<variant> (or without --tool if merge.tool is configured as <variant>), Git will consult mergetool.<variant>.layout to determine the tool's layout. If the variant-specific configuration is not available, vimdiff ' s is used as fallback. If that too is not available, a default layout with 4 windows will be used. To configure the layout, see the BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS section.
mergetool.hideResolved
During a merge, Git will automatically resolve as many conflicts as possible and write the $MERGED file containing conflict markers around any conflicts that it cannot resolve; $LOCAL and $REMOTE normally are the versions of the file from before Git`s conflict resolution. This flag causes $LOCAL and $REMOTE to be overwritten so that only the unresolved conflicts are presented to the merge tool. Can be configured per-tool via the mergetool.<tool>.hideResolved configuration variable. Defaults to false.
mergetool.keepBackup
After performing a merge, the original file with conflict markers can be saved as a file with a .orig extension. If this variable is set to false then this file is not preserved. Defaults to true (i.e. keep the backup files).
mergetool.keepTemporaries
When invoking a custom merge tool, Git uses a set of temporary files to pass to the tool. If the tool returns an error and this variable is set to true, then these temporary files will be preserved; otherwise, they will be removed after the tool has exited. Defaults to false.
mergetool.writeToTemp
Git writes temporary BASE, LOCAL, and REMOTE versions of conflicting files in the worktree by default. Git will attempt to use a temporary directory for these files when set true. Defaults to false.
mergetool.prompt
Prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program.
mergetool.guiDefault
Set true to use the merge.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select merge.guitool or merge.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the merge.guitool to be used.

TEMPORARY FILES

git mergetool creates *.orig backup files while resolving merges. These are safe to remove once a file has been merged and its git mergetool session has completed.

Setting the mergetool.keepBackup configuration variable to false causes git mergetool to automatically remove the backup files as files are successfully merged.

BACKEND SPECIFIC HINTS

vimdiff

Description

When specifying --tool=vimdiff in git mergetool Git will open Vim with a 4 windows layout distributed in the following way:

------------------------------------------
|             |           |              |
|   LOCAL     |   BASE    |   REMOTE     |
|             |           |              |
------------------------------------------
|                                        |
|                MERGED                  |
|                                        |
------------------------------------------

LOCAL, BASE and REMOTE are read-only buffers showing the contents of the conflicting file in specific commits ("commit you are merging into", "common ancestor commit" and "commit you are merging from" respectively)

MERGED is a writable buffer where you have to resolve the conflicts (using the other read-only buffers as a reference). Once you are done, save and exit Vim as usual (:wq) or, if you want to abort, exit using :cq.

Layout configuration

You can change the windows layout used by Vim by setting configuration variable mergetool.vimdiff.layout which accepts a string where the following separators have special meaning:

  • + is used to "open a new tab"
  • , is used to "open a new vertical split"
  • / is used to "open a new horizontal split"
  • @ is used to indicate the file containing the final version after solving the conflicts. If not present, MERGED will be used by default.

The precedence of the operators is as follows (you can use parentheses to change it):

`@` > `+` > `/` > `,`

Let's see some examples to understand how it works:

  • layout = "(LOCAL,BASE,REMOTE)/MERGED"

    This is exactly the same as the default layout we have already seen.

    Note that / has precedence over , and thus the parenthesis are not needed in this case. The next layout definition is equivalent:

    layout = "LOCAL,BASE,REMOTE / MERGED"
  • layout = "LOCAL,MERGED,REMOTE"

    If, for some reason, we are not interested in the BASE buffer.

    ------------------------------------------
    |             |           |              |
    |             |           |              |
    |   LOCAL     |   MERGED  |   REMOTE     |
    |             |           |              |
    |             |           |              |
    ------------------------------------------
  • layout = "MERGED"

    Only the MERGED buffer will be shown. Note, however, that all the other ones are still loaded in vim, and you can access them with the "buffers" command.

    ------------------------------------------
    |                                        |
    |                                        |
    |                 MERGED                 |
    |                                        |
    |                                        |
    ------------------------------------------
  • layout = "@LOCAL,REMOTE"

    When MERGED is not present in the layout, you must "mark" one of the buffers with an arobase (@). That will become the buffer you need to edit and save after resolving the conflicts.

    ------------------------------------------
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |     LOCAL         |    REMOTE          |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    ------------------------------------------
  • layout = "LOCAL,BASE,REMOTE / MERGED + BASE,LOCAL + BASE,REMOTE"

    Three tabs will open: the first one is a copy of the default layout, while the other two only show the differences between (BASE and LOCAL) and (BASE and REMOTE) respectively.

    ------------------------------------------
    | <TAB #1> |  TAB #2  |  TAB #3  |       |
    ------------------------------------------
    |             |           |              |
    |   LOCAL     |   BASE    |   REMOTE     |
    |             |           |              |
    ------------------------------------------
    |                                        |
    |                MERGED                  |
    |                                        |
    ------------------------------------------
    ------------------------------------------
    |  TAB #1  | <TAB #2> |  TAB #3  |       |
    ------------------------------------------
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |     BASE          |    LOCAL           |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    ------------------------------------------
    ------------------------------------------
    |  TAB #1  |  TAB #2  | <TAB #3> |       |
    ------------------------------------------
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |     BASE          |    REMOTE          |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    |                   |                    |
    ------------------------------------------
  • layout = "LOCAL,BASE,REMOTE / MERGED + BASE,LOCAL + BASE,REMOTE + (LOCAL/BASE/REMOTE),MERGED"

    Same as the previous example, but adds a fourth tab with the same information as the first tab, with a different layout.

    ---------------------------------------------
    |  TAB #1  |  TAB #2  |  TAB #3  | <TAB #4> |
    ---------------------------------------------
    |       LOCAL         |                     |
    |---------------------|                     |
    |       BASE          |        MERGED       |
    |---------------------|                     |
    |       REMOTE        |                     |
    ---------------------------------------------

    Note how in the third tab definition we need to use parentheses to make , have precedence over /.

Variants

Instead of --tool=vimdiff, you can also use one of these other variants:

  • --tool=gvimdiff, to open gVim instead of Vim.
  • --tool=nvimdiff, to open Neovim instead of Vim.

When using these variants, in order to specify a custom layout you will have to set configuration variables mergetool.gvimdiff.layout and mergetool.nvimdiff.layout instead of mergetool.vimdiff.layout (though the latter will be used as fallback if the variant-specific one is not set).

In addition, for backwards compatibility with previous Git versions, you can also append 1, 2 or 3 to either vimdiff or any of the variants (ex: vimdiff3, nvimdiff1, etc…) to use a predefined layout. In other words, using --tool=[g|n]vimdiff<x> is the same as using --tool=[g|n]vimdiff and setting configuration variable mergetool.[g|n]vimdiff.layout to…

  • <x>=1: "@LOCAL, REMOTE"
  • <x>=2: "LOCAL, MERGED, REMOTE"
  • <x>=3: "MERGED"

Example: using --tool=gvimdiff2 will open gvim with three columns (LOCAL, MERGED and REMOTE).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mktag(1)

NAME

git-mktag - Creates a tag object with extra validation

SYNOPSIS

git mktag

DESCRIPTION

Reads a tag's contents on standard input and creates a tag object. The output is the new tag's <object> identifier.

This command is mostly equivalent to the section called “git-hash-object(1)” invoked with -t tag -w --stdin. I.e. both of these will create and write a tag found in my-tag:

git mktag <my-tag
git hash-object -t tag -w --stdin <my-tag

The difference is that mktag will die before writing the tag if the tag doesn't pass a the section called “git-fsck(1)” check.

The "fsck" check done by mktag is stricter than what the section called “git-fsck(1)” would run by default in that all fsck.<msg-id> messages are promoted from warnings to errors (so e.g. a missing "tagger" line is an error).

Extra headers in the object are also an error under mktag, but ignored by the section called “git-fsck(1)”. This extra check can be turned off by setting the appropriate fsck.<msg-id> variable:

git -c fsck.extraHeaderEntry=ignore mktag <my-tag-with-headers

OPTIONS

--strict
By default mktag turns on the equivalent of the section called “git-fsck(1)” --strict mode. Use --no-strict to disable it.

Tag Format

A tag signature file, to be fed to this command's standard input, has a very simple fixed format: four lines of

object <hash>
type <typename>
tag <tagname>
tagger <tagger>

followed by some optional free-form message (some tags created by older Git may not have a tagger line). The message, when it exists, is separated by a blank line from the header. The message part may contain a signature that Git itself doesn't care about, but that can be verified with gpg.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mktree(1)

NAME

git-mktree - Build a tree-object from ls-tree formatted text

SYNOPSIS

git mktree [-z] [--missing] [--batch]

DESCRIPTION

Reads standard input in non-recursive ls-tree output format, and creates a tree object. The order of the tree entries is normalized by mktree so pre-sorting the input is not required. The object name of the tree object built is written to the standard output.

OPTIONS

-z
Read the NUL-terminated ls-tree -z output instead.
--missing
Allow missing objects. The default behaviour (without this option) is to verify that each tree entry's hash identifies an existing object. This option has no effect on the treatment of gitlink entries (aka "submodules") which are always allowed to be missing.
--batch
Allow building of more than one tree object before exiting. Each tree is separated by a single blank line. The final newline is optional. Note - if the -z option is used, lines are terminated with NUL.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-mv(1)

NAME

git-mv - Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink

SYNOPSIS

git mv [-v] [-f] [-n] [-k<source> <destination>
git mv [-v] [-f] [-n] [-k<source> <destination-directory>

DESCRIPTION

Move or rename a file, directory, or symlink.

In the first form, it renames <source>, which must exist and be either a file, symlink or directory, to <destination>. In the second form, <destination-directory> has to be an existing directory; the given sources will be moved into this directory.

The index is updated after successful completion, but the change must still be committed.

OPTIONS

-f , --force
Force renaming or moving of a file even if the <destination> exists.
-k
Skip move or rename actions which would lead to an error condition. An error happens when a source is neither existing nor controlled by Git, or when it would overwrite an existing file unless -f is given.
-n , --dry-run
Do nothing; only show what would happen
-v , --verbose
Report the names of files as they are moved.

SUBMODULES

Moving a submodule using a gitfile (which means they were cloned with a Git version 1.7.8 or newer) will update the gitfile and core.worktree setting to make the submodule work in the new location. It also will attempt to update the submodule.<name>.path setting in the the section called “gitmodules(5)” file and stage that file (unless -n is used).

BUGS

Each time a superproject update moves a populated submodule (e.g. when switching between commits before and after the move) a stale submodule checkout will remain in the old location and an empty directory will appear in the new location. To populate the submodule again in the new location the user will have to run "git submodule update" afterwards. Removing the old directory is only safe when it uses a gitfile, as otherwise the history of the submodule will be deleted too. Both steps will be obsolete when recursive submodule update has been implemented.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-multi-pack-index(1)

NAME

git-multi-pack-index - Write and verify multi-pack-indexes

SYNOPSIS

git multi-pack-index [--object-dir=<dir>] [--[no-]bitmap] <sub-command>

DESCRIPTION

Write or verify a multi-pack-index (MIDX) file.

OPTIONS

--object-dir=<dir>

Use given directory for the location of Git objects. We check <dir>/packs/multi-pack-index for the current MIDX file, and <dir>/packs for the pack-files to index.

<dir> must be an alternate of the current repository.

--[no-]progress
Turn progress on/off explicitly. If neither is specified, progress is shown if standard error is connected to a terminal. Supported by sub-commands write, verify, expire, and `repack.

The following subcommands are available:

write

Write a new MIDX file. The following options are available for the write sub-command:

--preferred-pack=<pack>
When specified, break ties in favor of this pack when there are additional copies of its objects in other packs. Ties for objects not found in the preferred pack are always resolved in favor of the copy in the pack with the highest mtime. If unspecified, the pack with the lowest mtime is used by default. The preferred pack must have at least one object.
--[no-]bitmap
Control whether or not a multi-pack bitmap is written.
--stdin-packs
Write a multi-pack index containing only the set of line-delimited pack index basenames provided over stdin.
--refs-snapshot=<path>

With --bitmap, optionally specify a file which contains a "refs snapshot" taken prior to repacking.

A reference snapshot is composed of line-delimited OIDs corresponding to the reference tips, usually taken by git repack prior to generating a new pack. A line may optionally start with a + character to indicate that the reference which corresponds to that OID is "preferred" (see the section called “git-config(1)”'s pack.preferBitmapTips.)

The file given at <path> is expected to be readable, and can contain duplicates. (If a given OID is given more than once, it is marked as preferred if at least one instance of it begins with the special + marker).

--incremental
Write an incremental MIDX file containing only objects and packs not present in an existing MIDX layer. Migrates non-incremental MIDXs to incremental ones when necessary. Incompatible with --bitmap.
verify
Verify the contents of the MIDX file.
expire

Delete the pack-files that are tracked by the MIDX file, but have no objects referenced by the MIDX (with the exception of .keep packs and cruft packs). Rewrite the MIDX file afterward to remove all references to these pack-files.

Note

this mode is incompatible with incremental MIDX files.

repack

Create a new pack-file containing objects in small pack-files referenced by the multi-pack-index. If the size given by the --batch-size=<size> argument is zero, then create a pack containing all objects referenced by the multi-pack-index. For a non-zero batch size, Select the pack-files by examining packs from oldest-to-newest, computing the "expected size" by counting the number of objects in the pack referenced by the multi-pack-index, then divide by the total number of objects in the pack and multiply by the pack size. We select packs with expected size below the batch size until the set of packs have total expected size at least the batch size, or all pack-files are considered. If only one pack-file is selected, then do nothing. If a new pack-file is created, rewrite the multi-pack-index to reference the new pack-file. A later run of git multi-pack-index expire will delete the pack-files that were part of this batch.

If repack.packKeptObjects is false, then any pack-files with an associated .keep file will not be selected for the batch to repack.

Note

this mode is incompatible with incremental MIDX files.

EXAMPLES

  • Write a MIDX file for the packfiles in the current .git directory.

    $ git multi-pack-index write
  • Write a MIDX file for the packfiles in the current .git directory with a corresponding bitmap.

    $ git multi-pack-index write --preferred-pack=<pack> --bitmap
  • Write a MIDX file for the packfiles in an alternate object store.

    $ git multi-pack-index --object-dir <alt> write
  • Verify the MIDX file for the packfiles in the current .git directory.

    $ git multi-pack-index verify

SEE ALSO

See The Multi-Pack-Index Design Document and the section called “gitformat-pack(5)” for more information on the multi-pack-index feature and its file format.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-name-rev(1)

NAME

git-name-rev - Find symbolic names for given revs

SYNOPSIS

git name-rev [--tags] [--refs=<pattern>]
               ( --all | --annotate-stdin | <commit-ish>… )

DESCRIPTION

Finds symbolic names suitable for human digestion for revisions given in any format parsable by git rev-parse.

OPTIONS

--tags
Do not use branch names, but only tags to name the commits
--refs=<pattern>
Only use refs whose names match a given shell pattern. The pattern can be a branch name, a tag name, or a fully qualified ref name. If given multiple times, use refs whose names match any of the given shell patterns. Use --no-refs to clear any previous ref patterns given.
--exclude=<pattern>
Do not use any ref whose name matches a given shell pattern. The pattern can be one of branch name, tag name or fully qualified ref name. If given multiple times, a ref will be excluded when it matches any of the given patterns. When used together with --refs, a ref will be used as a match only when it matches at least one --refs pattern and does not match any --exclude patterns. Use --no-exclude to clear the list of exclude patterns.
--all
List all commits reachable from all refs
--annotate-stdin

Transform stdin by substituting all the 40-character SHA-1 hexes (say $hex) with "$hex ($rev_name)". When used with --name-only, substitute with "$rev_name", omitting $hex altogether. This option was called --stdin in older versions of Git.

For example:

$ cat sample.txt

An abbreviated revision 2ae0a9cb82 will not be substituted.
The full name after substitution is 2ae0a9cb8298185a94e5998086f380a355dd8907,
while its tree object is 70d105cc79e63b81cfdcb08a15297c23e60b07ad

$ git name-rev --annotate-stdin <sample.txt

An abbreviated revision 2ae0a9cb82 will not be substituted.
The full name after substitution is 2ae0a9cb8298185a94e5998086f380a355dd8907 (master),
while its tree object is 70d105cc79e63b81cfdcb08a15297c23e60b07ad

$ git name-rev --name-only --annotate-stdin <sample.txt

An abbreviated revision 2ae0a9cb82 will not be substituted.
The full name after substitution is master,
while its tree object is 70d105cc79e63b81cfdcb08a15297c23e60b07ad
--name-only
Instead of printing both the SHA-1 and the name, print only the name. If given with --tags the usual tag prefix of "tags/" is also omitted from the name, matching the output of git-describe more closely.
--no-undefined
Die with error code != 0 when a reference is undefined, instead of printing undefined.
--always
Show uniquely abbreviated commit object as fallback.

EXAMPLES

Given a commit, find out where it is relative to the local refs. Say somebody wrote you about that fantastic commit 33db5f4d9027a10e477ccf054b2c1ab94f74c85a. Of course, you look into the commit, but that only tells you what happened, but not the context.

Enter git name-rev:

% git name-rev 33db5f4d9027a10e477ccf054b2c1ab94f74c85a
33db5f4d9027a10e477ccf054b2c1ab94f74c85a tags/v0.99~940

Now you are wiser, because you know that it happened 940 revisions before v0.99.

Another nice thing you can do is:

% git log | git name-rev --annotate-stdin

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-notes(1)

NAME

git-notes - Add or inspect object notes

SYNOPSIS

git notes [list [<object>]]
git notes add [-f] [--allow-empty] [--[no-]separator | --separator=<paragraph-break>] [--[no-]stripspace] [-F <file> | -m <msg> | (-c | -C<object>] [-e] [<object>]
git notes copy [-f] ( --stdin | <from-object> [<to-object>] )
git notes append [--allow-empty] [--[no-]separator | --separator=<paragraph-break>] [--[no-]stripspace] [-F <file> | -m <msg> | (-c | -C<object>] [-e] [<object>]
git notes edit [--allow-empty] [<object>] [--[no-]stripspace]
git notes show [<object>]
git notes merge [-v | -q] [-s <strategy> ] <notes-ref>
git notes merge --commit [-v | -q]
git notes merge --abort [-v | -q]
git notes remove [--ignore-missing] [--stdin] [<object>]
git notes prune [-n] [-v]
git notes get-ref

DESCRIPTION

Adds, removes, or reads notes attached to objects, without touching the objects themselves.

By default, notes are saved to and read from refs/notes/commits, but this default can be overridden. See the OPTIONS, CONFIGURATION, and ENVIRONMENT sections below. If this ref does not exist, it will be quietly created when it is first needed to store a note.

A typical use of notes is to supplement a commit message without changing the commit itself. Notes can be shown by git log along with the original commit message. To distinguish these notes from the message stored in the commit object, the notes are indented like the message, after an unindented line saying "Notes (<refname>):" (or "Notes:" for refs/notes/commits).

Notes can also be added to patches prepared with git format-patch by using the --notes option. Such notes are added as a patch commentary after a three dash separator line.

To change which notes are shown by git log, see the notes.displayRef discussion in CONFIGURATION.

See the notes.rewrite.<command> configuration for a way to carry notes across commands that rewrite commits.

SUBCOMMANDS

list
List the notes object for a given object. If no object is given, show a list of all note objects and the objects they annotate (in the format "<note-object> <annotated-object>"). This is the default subcommand if no subcommand is given.
add
Add notes for a given object (defaults to HEAD). Abort if the object already has notes (use -f to overwrite existing notes). However, if you're using add interactively (using an editor to supply the notes contents), then - instead of aborting - the existing notes will be opened in the editor (like the edit subcommand). If you specify multiple -m and -F, a blank line will be inserted between the messages. Use the --separator option to insert other delimiters. You can use -e to edit and fine-tune the message(s) supplied from -m and -F options interactively (using an editor) before adding the note.
copy

Copy the notes for the first object onto the second object (defaults to HEAD). Abort if the second object already has notes, or if the first object has none (use -f to overwrite existing notes to the second object). This subcommand is equivalent to: git notes add [-f] -C $(git notes list <from-object>) <to-object>

In --stdin mode, take lines in the format

<from-object> SP <to-object> [ SP <rest> ] LF

on standard input, and copy the notes from each <from-object> to its corresponding <to-object>. (The optional <rest> is ignored so that the command can read the input given to the post-rewrite hook.)

--stdin cannot be combined with object names given on the command line.

append
Append new message(s) given by -m or -F options to an existing note, or add them as a new note if one does not exist, for the object (defaults to HEAD). When appending to an existing note, a blank line is added before each new message as an inter-paragraph separator. The separator can be customized with the --separator option. Edit the notes to be appended given by -m and -F options with -e interactively (using an editor) before appending the note.
edit
Edit the notes for a given object (defaults to HEAD).
show
Show the notes for a given object (defaults to HEAD).
merge

Merge the given notes ref into the current notes ref. This will try to merge the changes made by the given notes ref (called "remote") since the merge-base (if any) into the current notes ref (called "local").

If conflicts arise and a strategy for automatically resolving conflicting notes (see the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section) is not given, the manual resolver is used. This resolver checks out the conflicting notes in a special worktree (.git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE), and instructs the user to manually resolve the conflicts there. When done, the user can either finalize the merge with git notes merge --commit, or abort the merge with git notes merge --abort.

remove

Remove the notes for given objects (defaults to HEAD). When giving zero or one object from the command line, this is equivalent to specifying an empty note message to the edit subcommand.

In --stdin mode, also remove the object names given on standard input. In other words, --stdin can be combined with object names from the command line.

prune
Remove all notes for non-existing/unreachable objects.
get-ref
Print the current notes ref. This provides an easy way to retrieve the current notes ref (e.g. from scripts).

OPTIONS

-f , --force
When adding notes to an object that already has notes, overwrite the existing notes (instead of aborting).
-m <msg> , --message=<msg>
Use the given note message (instead of prompting). If multiple -m options are given, their values are concatenated as separate paragraphs.
-F <file> , --file=<file>
Take the note message from the given file. Use - to read the note message from the standard input.
-C <object> , --reuse-message=<object>
Take the given blob object (for example, another note) as the note message. (Use git notes copy <object> instead to copy notes between objects.) Implies --no-stripspace since the default behavior is to copy the message verbatim.
-c <object> , --reedit-message=<object>
Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that the user can further edit the note message.
--allow-empty
Allow an empty note object to be stored. The default behavior is to automatically remove empty notes.
--separator=<paragraph-break> , --separator , --no-separator
Specify a string used as a custom inter-paragraph separator (a newline is added at the end as needed). If --no-separator, no separators will be added between paragraphs. Defaults to a blank line.
--stripspace , --no-stripspace

Clean up whitespace. Specifically (see the section called “git-stripspace(1)”):

  • remove trailing whitespace from all lines
  • collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
  • remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
  • add a missing \n to the last line if necessary.

--stripspace is the default except for -C/--reuse-message. However, keep in mind that this depends on the order of similar options. For example, for -C <object> -m<message>, --stripspace will be used because the default for -m overrides the previous -C. This is a known limitation that may be fixed in the future.

--ref=<ref>
Manipulate the notes tree in <ref>. This overrides GIT_NOTES_REF and the core.notesRef configuration. The ref specifies the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form a full name of the ref.
--ignore-missing
Do not consider it an error to request removing notes from an object that does not have notes attached to it.
--stdin
Only valid for remove and copy. See the respective subcommands.
-n , --dry-run
Do not remove anything; just report the object names whose notes would be removed.
-s <strategy> , --strategy=<strategy>
When merging notes, resolve notes conflicts using the given strategy. The following strategies are recognized: manual (default), ours, theirs, union and cat_sort_uniq. This option overrides the notes.mergeStrategy configuration setting. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section below for more information on each notes merge strategy.
--commit
Finalize an in-progress git notes merge. Use this option when you have resolved the conflicts that git notes merge stored in .git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE. This amends the partial merge commit created by git notes merge (stored in .git/NOTES_MERGE_PARTIAL) by adding the notes in .git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE. The notes ref stored in the .git/NOTES_MERGE_REF symref is updated to the resulting commit.
--abort
Abort/reset an in-progress git notes merge, i.e. a notes merge with conflicts. This simply removes all files related to the notes merge.
-q , --quiet
When merging notes, operate quietly.
-v , --verbose
When merging notes, be more verbose. When pruning notes, report all object names whose notes are removed.

DISCUSSION

Commit notes are blobs containing extra information about an object (usually information to supplement a commit's message). These blobs are taken from notes refs. A notes ref is usually a branch which contains "files" whose paths are the object names for the objects they describe, with some directory separators included for performance reasons [1].

Every notes change creates a new commit at the specified notes ref. You can therefore inspect the history of the notes by invoking, e.g., git log -p notes/commits. Currently the commit message only records which operation triggered the update, and the commit authorship is determined according to the usual rules (see the section called “git-commit(1)”). These details may change in the future.

It is also permitted for a notes ref to point directly to a tree object, in which case the history of the notes can be read with git log -p -g <refname>.

NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES

The default notes merge strategy is manual, which checks out conflicting notes in a special work tree for resolving notes conflicts (.git/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE), and instructs the user to resolve the conflicts in that work tree. When done, the user can either finalize the merge with git notes merge --commit, or abort the merge with git notes merge --abort.

Users may select an automated merge strategy from among the following using either -s/--strategy option or configuring notes.mergeStrategy accordingly:

ours automatically resolves conflicting notes in favor of the local version (i.e. the current notes ref).

theirs automatically resolves notes conflicts in favor of the remote version (i.e. the given notes ref being merged into the current notes ref).

union automatically resolves notes conflicts by concatenating the local and remote versions.

cat_sort_uniq is similar to union, but in addition to concatenating the local and remote versions, this strategy also sorts the resulting lines, and removes duplicate lines from the result. This is equivalent to applying the "cat | sort | uniq" shell pipeline to the local and remote versions. This strategy is useful if the notes follow a line-based format where one wants to avoid duplicated lines in the merge result. Note that if either the local or remote version contain duplicate lines prior to the merge, these will also be removed by this notes merge strategy.

EXAMPLES

You can use notes to add annotations with information that was not available at the time a commit was written.

$ git notes add -m 'Tested-by: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>' 72a144e2
$ git show -s 72a144e
[...]
    Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Notes:
    Tested-by: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>

In principle, a note is a regular Git blob, and any kind of (non-)format is accepted. You can binary-safely create notes from arbitrary files using git hash-object:

$ cc *.c
$ blob=$(git hash-object -w a.out)
$ git notes --ref=built add --allow-empty -C "$blob" HEAD

(You cannot simply use git notes --ref=built add -F a.out HEAD because that is not binary-safe.) Of course, it doesn't make much sense to display non-text-format notes with git log, so if you use such notes, you'll probably need to write some special-purpose tools to do something useful with them.

CONFIGURATION

core.notesRef
Notes ref to read and manipulate instead of refs/notes/commits. Must be an unabbreviated ref name. This setting can be overridden through the environment and command line.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content that follows is the same as what's found there:

notes.mergeStrategy

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on each strategy.

This setting can be overridden by passing the --strategy option to the section called “git-notes(1)”.

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy
Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general notes.mergeStrategy. See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in the section called “git-notes(1)” for more information on the available strategies.
notes.displayRef

Which ref (or refs, if a glob or specified more than once), in addition to the default set by core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages with the git log family of commands.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be disabled by the --no-notes option to the the section called “git-log(1)” family of commands, or by the --notes=<ref> option accepted by those commands.

The effective value of core.notesRef (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

notes.rewrite.<command>

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase), if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true. See also notes.rewriteRef below.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

notes.rewriteMode

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the notes.rewrite.<command> option), determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

notes.rewriteRef

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. May be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times.

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

Can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable. See notes.rewrite.<command> above for a further description of its format.

ENVIRONMENT

GIT_NOTES_REF
Which ref to manipulate notes from, instead of refs/notes/commits. This overrides the core.notesRef setting.
GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF

Colon-delimited list of refs or globs indicating which refs, in addition to the default from core.notesRef or GIT_NOTES_REF, to read notes from when showing commit messages. This overrides the notes.displayRef setting.

A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE
When copying notes during a rewrite, what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. This overrides the core.rewriteMode setting.
GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF

When rewriting commits, which notes to copy from the original to the rewritten commit. Must be a colon-delimited list of refs or globs.

If not set in the environment, the list of notes to copy depends on the notes.rewrite.<command> and notes.rewriteRef settings.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-p4(1)

NAME

git-p4 - Import from and submit to Perforce repositories

SYNOPSIS

git p4 clone [<sync-options>] [<clone-options>] <p4-depot-path>…
git p4 sync [<sync-options>] [<p4-depot-path>…]
git p4 rebase
git p4 submit [<submit-options>] [<master-branch-name>]

DESCRIPTION

This command provides a way to interact with p4 repositories using Git.

Create a new Git repository from an existing p4 repository using git p4 clone, giving it one or more p4 depot paths. Incorporate new commits from p4 changes with git p4 sync. The sync command is also used to include new branches from other p4 depot paths. Submit Git changes back to p4 using git p4 submit. The command git p4 rebase does a sync plus rebases the current branch onto the updated p4 remote branch.

EXAMPLES

  • Clone a repository:

    $ git p4 clone //depot/path/project
  • Do some work in the newly created Git repository:

    $ cd project
    $ vi foo.h
    $ git commit -a -m "edited foo.h"
  • Update the Git repository with recent changes from p4, rebasing your work on top:

    $ git p4 rebase
  • Submit your commits back to p4:

    $ git p4 submit

COMMANDS

Clone

Generally, git p4 clone is used to create a new Git directory from an existing p4 repository:

$ git p4 clone //depot/path/project

This:

  1. Creates an empty Git repository in a subdirectory called project.
  2. Imports the full contents of the head revision from the given p4 depot path into a single commit in the Git branch refs/remotes/p4/master.
  3. Creates a local branch, master from this remote and checks it out.

To reproduce the entire p4 history in Git, use the @all modifier on the depot path:

$ git p4 clone //depot/path/project@all

Sync

As development continues in the p4 repository, those changes can be included in the Git repository using:

$ git p4 sync

This command finds new changes in p4 and imports them as Git commits.

P4 repositories can be added to an existing Git repository using git p4 sync too:

$ mkdir repo-git
$ cd repo-git
$ git init
$ git p4 sync //path/in/your/perforce/depot

This imports the specified depot into refs/remotes/p4/master in an existing Git repository. The --branch option can be used to specify a different branch to be used for the p4 content.

If a Git repository includes branches refs/remotes/origin/p4, these will be fetched and consulted first during a git p4 sync. Since importing directly from p4 is considerably slower than pulling changes from a Git remote, this can be useful in a multi-developer environment.

If there are multiple branches, doing git p4 sync will automatically use the "BRANCH DETECTION" algorithm to try to partition new changes into the right branch. This can be overridden with the --branch option to specify just a single branch to update.

Rebase

A common working pattern is to fetch the latest changes from the p4 depot and merge them with local uncommitted changes. Often, the p4 repository is the ultimate location for all code, thus a rebase workflow makes sense. This command does git p4 sync followed by git rebase to move local commits on top of updated p4 changes.

$ git p4 rebase

Submit

Submitting changes from a Git repository back to the p4 repository requires a separate p4 client workspace. This should be specified using the P4CLIENT environment variable or the Git configuration variable git-p4.client. The p4 client must exist, but the client root will be created and populated if it does not already exist.

To submit all changes that are in the current Git branch but not in the p4/master branch, use:

$ git p4 submit

To specify a branch other than the current one, use:

$ git p4 submit topicbranch

To specify a single commit or a range of commits, use:

$ git p4 submit --commit <sha1>
$ git p4 submit --commit <sha1..sha1>

The upstream reference is generally refs/remotes/p4/master, but can be overridden using the --origin= command-line option.

The p4 changes will be created as the user invoking git p4 submit. The --preserve-user option will cause ownership to be modified according to the author of the Git commit. This option requires admin privileges in p4, which can be granted using p4 protect.

To shelve changes instead of submitting, use --shelve and --update-shelve:

$ git p4 submit --shelve
$ git p4 submit --update-shelve 1234 --update-shelve 2345

Unshelve

Unshelving will take a shelved P4 changelist, and produce the equivalent git commit in the branch refs/remotes/p4-unshelved/<changelist>.

The git commit is created relative to the current origin revision (HEAD by default). A parent commit is created based on the origin, and then the unshelve commit is created based on that.

The origin revision can be changed with the "--origin" option.

If the target branch in refs/remotes/p4-unshelved already exists, the old one will be renamed.

$ git p4 sync
$ git p4 unshelve 12345
$ git show p4-unshelved/12345
<submit more changes via p4 to the same files>
$ git p4 unshelve 12345
<refuses to unshelve until git is in sync with p4 again>

OPTIONS

General options

All commands except clone accept these options.

--git-dir <dir>
Set the GIT_DIR environment variable. See the section called “git(1)”.
-v , --verbose
Provide more progress information.

Sync options

These options can be used in the initial clone as well as in subsequent sync operations.

--branch <ref>

Import changes into <ref> instead of refs/remotes/p4/master. If <ref> starts with refs/, it is used as is. Otherwise, if it does not start with p4/, that prefix is added.

By default a <ref> not starting with refs/ is treated as the name of a remote-tracking branch (under refs/remotes/). This behavior can be modified using the --import-local option.

The default <ref> is "master".

This example imports a new remote "p4/proj2" into an existing Git repository:

    $ git init
    $ git p4 sync --branch=refs/remotes/p4/proj2 //depot/proj2
--detect-branches
Use the branch detection algorithm to find new paths in p4. It is documented below in "BRANCH DETECTION".
--changesfile <file>
Import exactly the p4 change numbers listed in file, one per line. Normally, git p4 inspects the current p4 repository state and detects the changes it should import.
--silent
Do not print any progress information.
--detect-labels
Query p4 for labels associated with the depot paths, and add them as tags in Git. Limited usefulness as only imports labels associated with new changelists. Deprecated.
--import-labels
Import labels from p4 into Git.
--import-local
By default, p4 branches are stored in refs/remotes/p4/, where they will be treated as remote-tracking branches by the section called “git-branch(1)” and other commands. This option instead puts p4 branches in refs/heads/p4/. Note that future sync operations must specify --import-local as well so that they can find the p4 branches in refs/heads.
--max-changes <n>
Import at most n changes, rather than the entire range of changes included in the given revision specifier. A typical usage would be use @all as the revision specifier, but then to use --max-changes 1000 to import only the last 1000 revisions rather than the entire revision history.
--changes-block-size <n>
The internal block size to use when converting a revision specifier such as @all into a list of specific change numbers. Instead of using a single call to p4 changes to find the full list of changes for the conversion, there are a sequence of calls to p4 changes -m, each of which requests one block of changes of the given size. The default block size is 500, which should usually be suitable.
--keep-path
The mapping of file names from the p4 depot path to Git, by default, involves removing the entire depot path. With this option, the full p4 depot path is retained in Git. For example, path //depot/main/foo/bar.c, when imported from //depot/main/, becomes foo/bar.c. With --keep-path, the Git path is instead depot/main/foo/bar.c.
--use-client-spec
Use a client spec to find the list of interesting files in p4. See the "CLIENT SPEC" section below.
-/ <path>
Exclude selected depot paths when cloning or syncing.

Clone options

These options can be used in an initial clone, along with the sync options described above.

--destination <directory>
Where to create the Git repository. If not provided, the last component in the p4 depot path is used to create a new directory.
--bare
Perform a bare clone. See the section called “git-clone(1)”.

Submit options

These options can be used to modify git p4 submit behavior.

--origin <commit>
Upstream location from which commits are identified to submit to p4. By default, this is the most recent p4 commit reachable from HEAD.
-M
Detect renames. See the section called “git-diff(1)”. Renames will be represented in p4 using explicit move operations. There is no corresponding option to detect copies, but there are variables for both moves and copies.
--preserve-user
Re-author p4 changes before submitting to p4. This option requires p4 admin privileges.
--export-labels
Export tags from Git as p4 labels. Tags found in Git are applied to the perforce working directory.
-n , --dry-run
Show just what commits would be submitted to p4; do not change state in Git or p4.
--prepare-p4-only
Apply a commit to the p4 workspace, opening, adding and deleting files in p4 as for a normal submit operation. Do not issue the final "p4 submit", but instead print a message about how to submit manually or revert. This option always stops after the first (oldest) commit. Git tags are not exported to p4.
--shelve
Instead of submitting create a series of shelved changelists. After creating each shelve, the relevant files are reverted/deleted. If you have multiple commits pending multiple shelves will be created.
--update-shelve CHANGELIST
Update an existing shelved changelist with this commit. Implies --shelve. Repeat for multiple shelved changelists.
--conflict=(ask|skip|quit)
Conflicts can occur when applying a commit to p4. When this happens, the default behavior ("ask") is to prompt whether to skip this commit and continue, or quit. This option can be used to bypass the prompt, causing conflicting commits to be automatically skipped, or to quit trying to apply commits, without prompting.
--branch <branch>
After submitting, sync this named branch instead of the default p4/master. See the "Sync options" section above for more information.
--commit (<sha1>|<sha1>..<sha1>)
Submit only the specified commit or range of commits, instead of the full list of changes that are in the current Git branch.
--disable-rebase
Disable the automatic rebase after all commits have been successfully submitted. Can also be set with git-p4.disableRebase.
--disable-p4sync
Disable the automatic sync of p4/master from Perforce after commits have been submitted. Implies --disable-rebase. Can also be set with git-p4.disableP4Sync. Sync with origin/master still goes ahead if possible.

Hooks for submit

p4-pre-submit

The p4-pre-submit hook is executed if it exists and is executable. The hook takes no parameters and nothing from standard input. Exiting with non-zero status from this script prevents git-p4 submit from launching. It can be bypassed with the --no-verify command line option.

One usage scenario is to run unit tests in the hook.

p4-prepare-changelist

The p4-prepare-changelist hook is executed right after preparing the default changelist message and before the editor is started. It takes one parameter, the name of the file that contains the changelist text. Exiting with a non-zero status from the script will abort the process.

The purpose of the hook is to edit the message file in place, and it is not suppressed by the --no-verify option. This hook is called even if --prepare-p4-only is set.

p4-changelist

The p4-changelist hook is executed after the changelist message has been edited by the user. It can be bypassed with the --no-verify option. It takes a single parameter, the name of the file that holds the proposed changelist text. Exiting with a non-zero status causes the command to abort.

The hook is allowed to edit the changelist file and can be used to normalize the text into some project standard format. It can also be used to refuse the Submit after inspect the message file.

p4-post-changelist

The p4-post-changelist hook is invoked after the submit has successfully occurred in P4. It takes no parameters and is meant primarily for notification and cannot affect the outcome of the git p4 submit action.

Rebase options

These options can be used to modify git p4 rebase behavior.

--import-labels
Import p4 labels.

Unshelve options

--origin
Sets the git refspec against which the shelved P4 changelist is compared. Defaults to p4/master.

DEPOT PATH SYNTAX

The p4 depot path argument to git p4 sync and git p4 clone can be one or more space-separated p4 depot paths, with an optional p4 revision specifier on the end:

"//depot/my/project"
Import one commit with all files in the #head change under that tree.
"//depot/my/project@all"
Import one commit for each change in the history of that depot path.
"//depot/my/project@1,6"
Import only changes 1 through 6.
"//depot/proj1@all //depot/proj2@all"
Import all changes from both named depot paths into a single repository. Only files below these directories are included. There is not a subdirectory in Git for each "proj1" and "proj2". You must use the --destination option when specifying more than one depot path. The revision specifier must be specified identically on each depot path. If there are files in the depot paths with the same name, the path with the most recently updated version of the file is the one that appears in Git.

See p4 help revisions for the full syntax of p4 revision specifiers.

CLIENT SPEC

The p4 client specification is maintained with the p4 client command and contains among other fields, a View that specifies how the depot is mapped into the client repository. The clone and sync commands can consult the client spec when given the --use-client-spec option or when the useClientSpec variable is true. After git p4 clone, the useClientSpec variable is automatically set in the repository configuration file. This allows future git p4 submit commands to work properly; the submit command looks only at the variable and does not have a command-line option.

The full syntax for a p4 view is documented in p4 help views. git p4 knows only a subset of the view syntax. It understands multi-line mappings, overlays with +, exclusions with - and double-quotes around whitespace. Of the possible wildcards, git p4 only handles , and only when it is at the end of the path. git p4 will complain if it encounters an unhandled wildcard.

Bugs in the implementation of overlap mappings exist. If multiple depot paths map through overlays to the same location in the repository, git p4 can choose the wrong one. This is hard to solve without dedicating a client spec just for git p4.

The name of the client can be given to git p4 in multiple ways. The variable git-p4.client takes precedence if it exists. Otherwise, normal p4 mechanisms of determining the client are used: environment variable P4CLIENT, a file referenced by P4CONFIG, or the local host name.

BRANCH DETECTION

P4 does not have the same concept of a branch as Git. Instead, p4 organizes its content as a directory tree, where by convention different logical branches are in different locations in the tree. The p4 branch command is used to maintain mappings between different areas in the tree, and indicate related content. git p4 can use these mappings to determine branch relationships.

If you have a repository where all the branches of interest exist as subdirectories of a single depot path, you can use --detect-branches when cloning or syncing to have git p4 automatically find subdirectories in p4, and to generate these as branches in Git.

For example, if the P4 repository structure is:

//depot/main/...
//depot/branch1/...

And "p4 branch -o branch1" shows a View line that looks like:

//depot/main/... //depot/branch1/...

Then this git p4 clone command:

git p4 clone --detect-branches //depot@all

produces a separate branch in refs/remotes/p4/ for //depot/main, called master, and one for //depot/branch1 called depot/branch1.

However, it is not necessary to create branches in p4 to be able to use them like branches. Because it is difficult to infer branch relationships automatically, a Git configuration setting git-p4.branchList can be used to explicitly identify branch relationships. It is a list of "source:destination" pairs, like a simple p4 branch specification, where the "source" and "destination" are the path elements in the p4 repository. The example above relied on the presence of the p4 branch. Without p4 branches, the same result will occur with:

git init depot
cd depot
git config git-p4.branchList main:branch1
git p4 clone --detect-branches //depot@all .

PERFORMANCE

The fast-import mechanism used by git p4 creates one pack file for each invocation of git p4 sync. Normally, Git garbage compression (the section called “git-gc(1)”) automatically compresses these to fewer pack files, but explicit invocation of git repack -adf may improve performance.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The following config settings can be used to modify git p4 behavior. They all are in the git-p4 section.

General variables

git-p4.user
User specified as an option to all p4 commands, with -u <user>. The environment variable P4USER can be used instead.
git-p4.password
Password specified as an option to all p4 commands, with -P <password>. The environment variable P4PASS can be used instead.
git-p4.port
Port specified as an option to all p4 commands, with -p <port>. The environment variable P4PORT can be used instead.
git-p4.host
Host specified as an option to all p4 commands, with -h <host>. The environment variable P4HOST can be used instead.
git-p4.client
Client specified as an option to all p4 commands, with -c <client>, including the client spec.
git-p4.retries
Specifies the number of times to retry a p4 command (notably, p4 sync) if the network times out. The default value is 3. Set the value to 0 to disable retries or if your p4 version does not support retries (pre 2012.2).

Clone and sync variables

git-p4.syncFromOrigin
Because importing commits from other Git repositories is much faster than importing them from p4, a mechanism exists to find p4 changes first in Git remotes. If branches exist under refs/remote/origin/p4, those will be fetched and used when syncing from p4. This variable can be set to false to disable this behavior.
git-p4.branchUser
One phase in branch detection involves looking at p4 branches to find new ones to import. By default, all branches are inspected. This option limits the search to just those owned by the single user named in the variable.
git-p4.branchList

List of branches to be imported when branch detection is enabled. Each entry should be a pair of branch names separated by a colon (:). This example declares that both branchA and branchB were created from main:

git config       git-p4.branchList main:branchA
git config --add git-p4.branchList main:branchB
git-p4.ignoredP4Labels
List of p4 labels to ignore. This is built automatically as unimportable labels are discovered.
git-p4.importLabels
Import p4 labels into git, as per --import-labels.
git-p4.labelImportRegexp
Only p4 labels matching this regular expression will be imported. The default value is [a-zA-Z0-9_\-.]+$.
git-p4.useClientSpec
Specify that the p4 client spec should be used to identify p4 depot paths of interest. This is equivalent to specifying the option --use-client-spec. See the "CLIENT SPEC" section above. This variable is a boolean, not the name of a p4 client.
git-p4.pathEncoding
Perforce keeps the encoding of a path as given by the originating OS. Git expects paths encoded as UTF-8. Use this config to tell git-p4 what encoding Perforce had used for the paths. This encoding is used to transcode the paths to UTF-8. As an example, Perforce on Windows often uses "cp1252" to encode path names. If this option is passed into a p4 clone request, it is persisted in the resulting new git repo.
git-p4.metadataDecodingStrategy
Perforce keeps the encoding of a changelist descriptions and user full names as stored by the client on a given OS. The p4v client uses the OS-local encoding, and so different users can end up storing different changelist descriptions or user full names in different encodings, in the same depot. Git tolerates inconsistent/incorrect encodings in commit messages and author names, but expects them to be specified in utf-8. git-p4 can use three different decoding strategies in handling the encoding uncertainty in Perforce: passthrough simply passes the original bytes through from Perforce to git, creating usable but incorrectly-encoded data when the Perforce data is encoded as anything other than utf-8. strict expects the Perforce data to be encoded as utf-8, and fails to import when this is not true. fallback attempts to interpret the data as utf-8, and otherwise falls back to using a secondary encoding - by default the common windows encoding cp-1252 - with upper-range bytes escaped if decoding with the fallback encoding also fails. Under python2 the default strategy is passthrough for historical reasons, and under python3 the default is fallback. When strict is selected and decoding fails, the error message will propose changing this config parameter as a workaround. If this option is passed into a p4 clone request, it is persisted into the resulting new git repo.
git-p4.metadataFallbackEncoding
Specify the fallback encoding to use when decoding Perforce author names and changelists descriptions using the fallback strategy (see git-p4.metadataDecodingStrategy). The fallback encoding will only be used when decoding as utf-8 fails. This option defaults to cp1252, a common windows encoding. If this option is passed into a p4 clone request, it is persisted into the resulting new git repo.
git-p4.largeFileSystem

Specify the system that is used for large (binary) files. Please note that large file systems do not support the git p4 submit command. Only Git LFS is implemented right now (see https://git-lfs.github.com/ for more information). Download and install the Git LFS command line extension to use this option and configure it like this:

git config       git-p4.largeFileSystem GitLFS
git-p4.largeFileExtensions
All files matching a file extension in the list will be processed by the large file system. Do not prefix the extensions with ..
git-p4.largeFileThreshold
All files with an uncompressed size exceeding the threshold will be processed by the large file system. By default the threshold is defined in bytes. Add the suffix k, m, or g to change the unit.
git-p4.largeFileCompressedThreshold
All files with a compressed size exceeding the threshold will be processed by the large file system. This option might slow down your clone/sync process. By default the threshold is defined in bytes. Add the suffix k, m, or g to change the unit.
git-p4.largeFilePush
Boolean variable which defines if large files are automatically pushed to a server.
git-p4.keepEmptyCommits
A changelist that contains only excluded files will be imported as an empty commit if this boolean option is set to true.
git-p4.mapUser

Map a P4 user to a name and email address in Git. Use a string with the following format to create a mapping:

git config --add git-p4.mapUser "p4user = First Last <mail@address.com>"

A mapping will override any user information from P4. Mappings for multiple P4 user can be defined.

Submit variables

git-p4.detectRenames
Detect renames. See the section called “git-diff(1)”. This can be true, false, or a score as expected by git diff -M.
git-p4.detectCopies
Detect copies. See the section called “git-diff(1)”. This can be true, false, or a score as expected by git diff -C.
git-p4.detectCopiesHarder
Detect copies harder. See the section called “git-diff(1)”. A boolean.
git-p4.preserveUser
On submit, re-author changes to reflect the Git author, regardless of who invokes git p4 submit.
git-p4.allowMissingP4Users
When preserveUser is true, git p4 normally dies if it cannot find an author in the p4 user map. This setting submits the change regardless.
git-p4.skipSubmitEdit
The submit process invokes the editor before each p4 change is submitted. If this setting is true, though, the editing step is skipped.
git-p4.skipSubmitEditCheck
After editing the p4 change message, git p4 makes sure that the description really was changed by looking at the file modification time. This option disables that test.
git-p4.allowSubmit
By default, any branch can be used as the source for a git p4 submit operation. This configuration variable, if set, permits only the named branches to be used as submit sources. Branch names must be the short names (no "refs/heads/"), and should be separated by commas (","), with no spaces.
git-p4.skipUserNameCheck
If the user running git p4 submit does not exist in the p4 user map, git p4 exits. This option can be used to force submission regardless.
git-p4.attemptRCSCleanup
If enabled, git p4 submit will attempt to cleanup RCS keywords ($Header$, etc). These would otherwise cause merge conflicts and prevent the submit going ahead. This option should be considered experimental at present.
git-p4.exportLabels
Export Git tags to p4 labels, as per --export-labels.
git-p4.labelExportRegexp
Only p4 labels matching this regular expression will be exported. The default value is [a-zA-Z0-9_\-.]+$.
git-p4.conflict
Specify submit behavior when a conflict with p4 is found, as per --conflict. The default behavior is ask.
git-p4.disableRebase
Do not rebase the tree against p4/master following a submit.
git-p4.disableP4Sync
Do not sync p4/master with Perforce following a submit. Implies git-p4.disableRebase.

IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS

  • Changesets from p4 are imported using Git fast-import.
  • Cloning or syncing does not require a p4 client; file contents are collected using p4 print.
  • Submitting requires a p4 client, which is not in the same location as the Git repository. Patches are applied, one at a time, to this p4 client and submitted from there.
  • Each commit imported by git p4 has a line at the end of the log message indicating the p4 depot location and change number. This line is used by later git p4 sync operations to know which p4 changes are new.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-pack-objects(1)

NAME

git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects

SYNOPSIS

git pack-objects [-q | --progress | --all-progress] [--all-progress-implied]
        [--no-reuse-delta] [--delta-base-offset] [--non-empty]
        [--local] [--incremental] [--window=<n>] [--depth=<n>]
        [--revs [--unpacked | --all]] [--keep-pack=<pack-name>]
        [--cruft] [--cruft-expiration=<time>]
        [--stdout [--filter=<filter-spec>] | <base-name>]
        [--shallow] [--keep-true-parents] [--[no-]sparse]
        [--name-hash-version=<n>] < <object-list>

DESCRIPTION

Reads list of objects from the standard input, and writes either one or more packed archives with the specified base-name to disk, or a packed archive to the standard output.

A packed archive is an efficient way to transfer a set of objects between two repositories as well as an access efficient archival format. In a packed archive, an object is either stored as a compressed whole or as a difference from some other object. The latter is often called a delta.

The packed archive format (.pack) is designed to be self-contained so that it can be unpacked without any further information. Therefore, each object that a delta depends upon must be present within the pack.

A pack index file (.idx) is generated for fast, random access to the objects in the pack. Placing both the index file (.idx) and the packed archive (.pack) in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES) enables Git to read from the pack archive.

The git unpack-objects command can read the packed archive and expand the objects contained in the pack into "one-file one-object" format; this is typically done by the smart-pull commands when a pack is created on-the-fly for efficient network transport by their peers.

OPTIONS

base-name
Write into pairs of files (.pack and .idx), using <base-name> to determine the name of the created file. When this option is used, the two files in a pair are written in <base-name>-<SHA-1>.{pack,idx} files. <SHA-1> is a hash based on the pack content and is written to the standard output of the command.
--stdout
Write the pack contents (what would have been written to .pack file) out to the standard output.
--revs
Read the revision arguments from the standard input, instead of individual object names. The revision arguments are processed the same way as git rev-list with the --objects flag uses its commit arguments to build the list of objects it outputs. The objects on the resulting list are packed. Besides revisions, --not or --shallow <SHA-1> lines are also accepted.
--unpacked
This implies --revs. When processing the list of revision arguments read from the standard input, limit the objects packed to those that are not already packed.
--all
This implies --revs. In addition to the list of revision arguments read from the standard input, pretend as if all refs under refs/ are specified to be included.
--include-tag
Include unasked-for annotated tags if the object they reference was included in the resulting packfile. This can be useful to send new tags to native Git clients.
--stdin-packs

Read the basenames of packfiles (e.g., pack-1234abcd.pack) from the standard input, instead of object names or revision arguments. The resulting pack contains all objects listed in the included packs (those not beginning with ^), excluding any objects listed in the excluded packs (beginning with ^).

Incompatible with --revs, or options that imply --revs (such as --all), with the exception of --unpacked, which is compatible.

--cruft

Packs unreachable objects into a separate "cruft" pack, denoted by the existence of a .mtimes file. Typically used by git repack --cruft. Callers provide a list of pack names and indicate which packs will remain in the repository, along with which packs will be deleted (indicated by the - prefix). The contents of the cruft pack are all objects not contained in the surviving packs which have not exceeded the grace period (see --cruft-expiration below), or which have exceeded the grace period, but are reachable from an other object which hasn't.

When the input lists a pack containing all reachable objects (and lists all other packs as pending deletion), the corresponding cruft pack will contain all unreachable objects (with mtime newer than the --cruft-expiration) along with any unreachable objects whose mtime is older than the --cruft-expiration, but are reachable from an unreachable object whose mtime is newer than the --cruft-expiration).

Incompatible with --unpack-unreachable, --keep-unreachable, --pack-loose-unreachable, --stdin-packs, as well as any other options which imply --revs.

--cruft-expiration=<approxidate>
If specified, objects are eliminated from the cruft pack if they have an mtime older than <approxidate>. If unspecified (and given --cruft), then no objects are eliminated.
--window=<n> , --depth=<n>

These two options affect how the objects contained in the pack are stored using delta compression. The objects are first internally sorted by type, size and optionally names and compared against the other objects within --window to see if using delta compression saves space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker side, because delta data needs to be applied that many times to get to the necessary object.

The default value for --window is 10 and --depth is 50. The maximum depth is 4095.

--window-memory=<n>
This option provides an additional limit on top of --window; the window size will dynamically scale down so as to not take up more than <n> bytes in memory. This is useful in repositories with a mix of large and small objects to not run out of memory with a large window, but still be able to take advantage of the large window for the smaller objects. The size can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". --window-memory=0 makes memory usage unlimited. The default is taken from the pack.windowMemory configuration variable.
--max-pack-size=<n>
In unusual scenarios, you may not be able to create files larger than a certain size on your filesystem, and this option can be used to tell the command to split the output packfile into multiple independent packfiles, each not larger than the given size. The size can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". The minimum size allowed is limited to 1 MiB. The default is unlimited, unless the config variable pack.packSizeLimit is set. Note that this option may result in a larger and slower repository; see the discussion in pack.packSizeLimit.
--honor-pack-keep
This flag causes an object already in a local pack that has a .keep file to be ignored, even if it would have otherwise been packed.
--keep-pack=<pack-name>
This flag causes an object already in the given pack to be ignored, even if it would have otherwise been packed. <pack-name> is the pack file name without leading directory (e.g. pack-123.pack). The option could be specified multiple times to keep multiple packs.
--incremental
This flag causes an object already in a pack to be ignored even if it would have otherwise been packed.
--local
This flag causes an object that is borrowed from an alternate object store to be ignored even if it would have otherwise been packed.
--non-empty
Only create a packed archive if it would contain at least one object.
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--all-progress
When --stdout is specified then progress report is displayed during the object count and compression phases but inhibited during the write-out phase. The reason is that in some cases the output stream is directly linked to another command which may wish to display progress status of its own as it processes incoming pack data. This flag is like --progress except that it forces progress report for the write-out phase as well even if --stdout is used.
--all-progress-implied
This is used to imply --all-progress whenever progress display is activated. Unlike --all-progress this flag doesn't actually force any progress display by itself.
-q
This flag makes the command not to report its progress on the standard error stream.
--no-reuse-delta
When creating a packed archive in a repository that has existing packs, the command reuses existing deltas. This sometimes results in a slightly suboptimal pack. This flag tells the command not to reuse existing deltas but compute them from scratch.
--no-reuse-object
This flag tells the command not to reuse existing object data at all, including non deltified object, forcing recompression of everything. This implies --no-reuse-delta. Useful only in the obscure case where wholesale enforcement of a different compression level on the packed data is desired.
--compression=<n>
Specifies compression level for newly-compressed data in the generated pack. If not specified, pack compression level is determined first by pack.compression, then by core.compression, and defaults to -1, the zlib default, if neither is set. Add --no-reuse-object if you want to force a uniform compression level on all data no matter the source.
--[no-]sparse
Toggle the "sparse" algorithm to determine which objects to include in the pack, when combined with the "--revs" option. This algorithm only walks trees that appear in paths that introduce new objects. This can have significant performance benefits when computing a pack to send a small change. However, it is possible that extra objects are added to the pack-file if the included commits contain certain types of direct renames. If this option is not included, it defaults to the value of pack.useSparse, which is true unless otherwise specified.
--thin

Create a "thin" pack by omitting the common objects between a sender and a receiver in order to reduce network transfer. This option only makes sense in conjunction with --stdout.

Note: A thin pack violates the packed archive format by omitting required objects and is thus unusable by Git without making it self-contained. Use git index-pack --fix-thin (see the section called “git-index-pack(1)”) to restore the self-contained property.

--shallow
Optimize a pack that will be provided to a client with a shallow repository. This option, combined with --thin, can result in a smaller pack at the cost of speed.
--delta-base-offset

A packed archive can express the base object of a delta as either a 20-byte object name or as an offset in the stream, but ancient versions of Git don't understand the latter. By default, git pack-objects only uses the former format for better compatibility. This option allows the command to use the latter format for compactness. Depending on the average delta chain length, this option typically shrinks the resulting packfile by 3-5 per-cent.

Note: Porcelain commands such as git gc (see the section called “git-gc(1)”), git repack (see the section called “git-repack(1)”) pass this option by default in modern Git when they put objects in your repository into pack files. So does git bundle (see the section called “git-bundle(1)”) when it creates a bundle.

--threads=<n>
Specifies the number of threads to spawn when searching for best delta matches. This requires that pack-objects be compiled with pthreads otherwise this option is ignored with a warning. This is meant to reduce packing time on multiprocessor machines. The required amount of memory for the delta search window is however multiplied by the number of threads. Specifying 0 will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPU's and set the number of threads accordingly.
--index-version=<version>[,<offset>]
This is intended to be used by the test suite only. It allows to force the version for the generated pack index, and to force 64-bit index entries on objects located above the given offset.
--keep-true-parents
With this option, parents that are hidden by grafts are packed nevertheless.
--filter=<filter-spec>
Omits certain objects (usually blobs) from the resulting packfile. See the section called “git-rev-list(1)” for valid <filter-spec> forms.
--no-filter
Turns off any previous --filter= argument.
--missing=<missing-action>

A debug option to help with future "partial clone" development. This option specifies how missing objects are handled.

The form --missing=error requests that pack-objects stop with an error if a missing object is encountered. If the repository is a partial clone, an attempt to fetch missing objects will be made before declaring them missing. This is the default action.

The form --missing=allow-any will allow object traversal to continue if a missing object is encountered. No fetch of a missing object will occur. Missing objects will silently be omitted from the results.

The form --missing=allow-promisor is like allow-any, but will only allow object traversal to continue for EXPECTED promisor missing objects. No fetch of a missing object will occur. An unexpected missing object will raise an error.

--exclude-promisor-objects
Omit objects that are known to be in the promisor remote. (This option has the purpose of operating only on locally created objects, so that when we repack, we still maintain a distinction between locally created objects [without .promisor] and objects from the promisor remote [with .promisor].) This is used with partial clone.
--keep-unreachable
Objects unreachable from the refs in packs named with --unpacked= option are added to the resulting pack, in addition to the reachable objects that are not in packs marked with *.keep files. This implies --revs.
--pack-loose-unreachable
Pack unreachable loose objects (and their loose counterparts removed). This implies --revs.
--unpack-unreachable
Keep unreachable objects in loose form. This implies --revs.
--delta-islands
Restrict delta matches based on "islands". See DELTA ISLANDS below.
--name-hash-version=<n>

While performing delta compression, Git groups objects that may be similar based on heuristics using the path to that object. While grouping objects by an exact path match is good for paths with many versions, there are benefits for finding delta pairs across different full paths. Git collects objects by type and then by a "name hash" of the path and then by size, hoping to group objects that will compress well together.

The default name hash version is 1, which prioritizes hash locality by considering the final bytes of the path as providing the maximum magnitude to the hash function. This version excels at distinguishing short paths and finding renames across directories. However, the hash function depends primarily on the final 16 bytes of the path. If there are many paths in the repo that have the same final 16 bytes and differ only by parent directory, then this name-hash may lead to too many collisions and cause poor results. At the moment, this version is required when writing reachability bitmap files with --write-bitmap-index.

The name hash version 2 has similar locality features as version 1, except it considers each path component separately and overlays the hashes with a shift. This still prioritizes the final bytes of the path, but also "salts" the lower bits of the hash using the parent directory names. This method allows for some of the locality benefits of version 1 while breaking most of the collisions from a similarly-named file appearing in many different directories. At the moment, this version is not allowed when writing reachability bitmap files with --write-bitmap-index and it will be automatically changed to version 1.

DELTA ISLANDS

When possible, pack-objects tries to reuse existing on-disk deltas to avoid having to search for new ones on the fly. This is an important optimization for serving fetches, because it means the server can avoid inflating most objects at all and just send the bytes directly from disk. This optimization can't work when an object is stored as a delta against a base which the receiver does not have (and which we are not already sending). In that case the server "breaks" the delta and has to find a new one, which has a high CPU cost. Therefore it's important for performance that the set of objects in on-disk delta relationships match what a client would fetch.

In a normal repository, this tends to work automatically. The objects are mostly reachable from the branches and tags, and that's what clients fetch. Any deltas we find on the server are likely to be between objects the client has or will have.

But in some repository setups, you may have several related but separate groups of ref tips, with clients tending to fetch those groups independently. For example, imagine that you are hosting several "forks" of a repository in a single shared object store, and letting clients view them as separate repositories through GIT_NAMESPACE or separate repos using the alternates mechanism. A naive repack may find that the optimal delta for an object is against a base that is only found in another fork. But when a client fetches, they will not have the base object, and we'll have to find a new delta on the fly.

A similar situation may exist if you have many refs outside of refs/heads/ and refs/tags/ that point to related objects (e.g., refs/pull or refs/changes used by some hosting providers). By default, clients fetch only heads and tags, and deltas against objects found only in those other groups cannot be sent as-is.

Delta islands solve this problem by allowing you to group your refs into distinct "islands". Pack-objects computes which objects are reachable from which islands, and refuses to make a delta from an object A against a base which is not present in all of A's islands. This results in slightly larger packs (because we miss some delta opportunities), but guarantees that a fetch of one island will not have to recompute deltas on the fly due to crossing island boundaries.

When repacking with delta islands the delta window tends to get clogged with candidates that are forbidden by the config. Repacking with a big --window helps (and doesn't take as long as it otherwise might because we can reject some object pairs based on islands before doing any computation on the content).

Islands are configured via the pack.island option, which can be specified multiple times. Each value is a left-anchored regular expressions matching refnames. For example:

[pack]
island = refs/heads/
island = refs/tags/

puts heads and tags into an island (whose name is the empty string; see below for more on naming). Any refs which do not match those regular expressions (e.g., refs/pull/123) is not in any island. Any object which is reachable only from refs/pull/ (but not heads or tags) is therefore not a candidate to be used as a base for refs/heads/.

Refs are grouped into islands based on their "names", and two regexes that produce the same name are considered to be in the same island. The names are computed from the regexes by concatenating any capture groups from the regex, with a - dash in between. (And if there are no capture groups, then the name is the empty string, as in the above example.) This allows you to create arbitrary numbers of islands. Only up to 14 such capture groups are supported though.

For example, imagine you store the refs for each fork in refs/virtual/ID, where ID is a numeric identifier. You might then configure:

[pack]
island = refs/virtual/([0-9]+)/heads/
island = refs/virtual/([0-9]+)/tags/
island = refs/virtual/([0-9]+)/(pull)/

That puts the heads and tags for each fork in their own island (named "1234" or similar), and the pull refs for each go into their own "1234-pull".

Note that we pick a single island for each regex to go into, using "last one wins" ordering (which allows repo-specific config to take precedence over user-wide config, and so forth).

CONFIGURATION

Various configuration variables affect packing, see the section called “git-config(1)” (search for "pack" and "delta").

Notably, delta compression is not used on objects larger than the core.bigFileThreshold configuration variable and on files with the attribute delta set to false.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-pack-redundant(1)

NAME

git-pack-redundant - Find redundant pack files

SYNOPSIS

git pack-redundant [--verbose] [--alt-odb] (--all | <pack-filename>…)

WARNING

git pack-redundant has been deprecated and is scheduled for removal in a future version of Git. Because it can only remove entire duplicate packs and not individual duplicate objects, it is generally not a useful tool for reducing repository size. You are better off using git gc to do so, which will put objects into a new pack, removing duplicates.

Running pack-redundant without the --i-still-use-this flag will fail in this release. If you believe you have a use case for which pack-redundant is better suited and oppose this removal, please contact the Git mailing list at git@vger.kernel.org. More information about the list is available at https://git-scm.com/community.

DESCRIPTION

This program computes which packs in your repository are redundant. The output is suitable for piping to xargs rm if you are in the root of the repository.

git pack-redundant accepts a list of objects on standard input. Any objects given will be ignored when checking which packs are required. This makes the following command useful when wanting to remove packs which contain unreachable objects.

git fsck --full --unreachable | cut -d ' ' -f3 | \ git pack-redundant --all | xargs rm

OPTIONS

--all
Processes all packs. Any filenames on the command line are ignored.
--alt-odb
Don't require objects present in packs from alternate object database (odb) directories to be present in local packs.
--verbose
Outputs some statistics to stderr. Has a small performance penalty.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-pack-refs(1)

NAME

git-pack-refs - Pack heads and tags for efficient repository access

SYNOPSIS

git pack-refs [--all] [--no-prune] [--auto] [--include <pattern>] [--exclude <pattern>]

DESCRIPTION

Traditionally, tips of branches and tags (collectively known as refs) were stored one file per ref in a (sub)directory under $GIT_DIR/refs directory. While many branch tips tend to be updated often, most tags and some branch tips are never updated. When a repository has hundreds or thousands of tags, this one-file-per-ref format both wastes storage and hurts performance.

This command is used to solve the storage and performance problem by storing the refs in a single file, $GIT_DIR/packed-refs. When a ref is missing from the traditional $GIT_DIR/refs directory hierarchy, it is looked up in this file and used if found.

Subsequent updates to branches always create new files under $GIT_DIR/refs directory hierarchy.

A recommended practice to deal with a repository with too many refs is to pack its refs with --all once, and occasionally run git pack-refs. Tags are by definition stationary and are not expected to change. Branch heads will be packed with the initial pack-refs --all, but only the currently active branch heads will become unpacked, and the next pack-refs (without --all) will leave them unpacked.

OPTIONS

--all
The command by default packs all tags and refs that are already packed, and leaves other refs alone. This is because branches are expected to be actively developed and packing their tips does not help performance. This option causes all refs to be packed as well, with the exception of hidden refs, broken refs, and symbolic refs. Useful for a repository with many branches of historical interests.
--no-prune
The command usually removes loose refs under $GIT_DIR/refs hierarchy after packing them. This option tells it not to.
--auto

Pack refs as needed depending on the current state of the ref database. The behavior depends on the ref format used by the repository and may change in the future.

  • "files": No special handling for --auto has been implemented.
  • "reftable": Tables are compacted such that they form a geometric sequence. For two tables N and N+1, where N+1 is newer, this maintains the property that N is at least twice as big as N+1. Only tables that violate this property are compacted.
--include <pattern>
Pack refs based on a glob(7) pattern. Repetitions of this option accumulate inclusion patterns. If a ref is both included in --include and --exclude, --exclude takes precedence. Using --include will preclude all tags from being included by default. Symbolic refs and broken refs will never be packed. When used with --all, it will be a noop. Use --no-include to clear and reset the list of patterns.
--exclude <pattern>

Do not pack refs matching the given glob(7) pattern. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns. Use --no-exclude to clear and reset the list of patterns. If a ref is already packed, including it with --exclude will not unpack it.

When used with --all, pack only loose refs which do not match any of the provided --exclude patterns.

When used with --include, refs provided to --include, minus refs that are provided to --exclude will be packed.

BUGS

Older documentation written before the packed-refs mechanism was introduced may still say things like ".git/refs/heads/<branch> file exists" when it means "branch <branch> exists".

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-patch-id(1)

NAME

git-patch-id - Compute unique ID for a patch

SYNOPSIS

git patch-id [--stable | --unstable | --verbatim]

DESCRIPTION

Read a patch from the standard input and compute the patch ID for it.

A "patch ID" is nothing but a sum of SHA-1 of the file diffs associated with a patch, with line numbers ignored. As such, it's "reasonably stable", but at the same time also reasonably unique, i.e., two patches that have the same "patch ID" are almost guaranteed to be the same thing.

The main usecase for this command is to look for likely duplicate commits.

When dealing with git diff-tree output, it takes advantage of the fact that the patch is prefixed with the object name of the commit, and outputs two 40-byte hexadecimal strings. The first string is the patch ID, and the second string is the commit ID. This can be used to make a mapping from patch ID to commit ID.

OPTIONS

--verbatim

Calculate the patch-id of the input as it is given, do not strip any whitespace.

This is the default if patchid.verbatim is true.
--stable

Use a "stable" sum of hashes as the patch ID. With this option:

  • Reordering file diffs that make up a patch does not affect the ID. In particular, two patches produced by comparing the same two trees with two different settings for "-O<orderfile>" result in the same patch ID signature, thereby allowing the computed result to be used as a key to index some meta-information about the change between the two trees;
  • Result is different from the value produced by git 1.9 and older or produced when an "unstable" hash (see --unstable below) is configured - even when used on a diff output taken without any use of "-O<orderfile>", thereby making existing databases storing such "unstable" or historical patch-ids unusable.
  • All whitespace within the patch is ignored and does not affect the id.

    This is the default if patchid.stable is set to true.
--unstable

Use an "unstable" hash as the patch ID. With this option, the result produced is compatible with the patch-id value produced by git 1.9 and older and whitespace is ignored. Users with pre-existing databases storing patch-ids produced by git 1.9 and older (who do not deal with reordered patches) may want to use this option.

This is the default.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-prune-packed(1)

NAME

git-prune-packed - Remove extra objects that are already in pack files

SYNOPSIS

git prune-packed [-n | --dry-run] [-q | --quiet]

DESCRIPTION

This program searches the $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY for all objects that currently exist in a pack file as well as in the independent object directories.

All such extra objects are removed.

A pack is a collection of objects, individually compressed, with delta compression applied, stored in a single file, with an associated index file.

Packs are used to reduce the load on mirror systems, backup engines, disk storage, etc.

OPTIONS

-n , --dry-run
Don't actually remove any objects, only show those that would have been removed.
-q , --quiet
Squelch the progress indicator.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-prune(1)

NAME

git-prune - Prune all unreachable objects from the object database

SYNOPSIS

git prune [-n] [-v] [--progress] [--expire <time>] [--] [<head>…]

DESCRIPTION

Note

In most cases, users should run git gc, which calls git prune. See the section "NOTES", below.

This runs git fsck --unreachable using all the refs available in refs/, optionally with an additional set of objects specified on the command line, and prunes all unpacked objects unreachable from any of these head objects from the object database. In addition, it prunes the unpacked objects that are also found in packs by running git prune-packed. It also removes entries from .git/shallow that are not reachable by any ref.

Note that unreachable, packed objects will remain. If this is not desired, see the section called “git-repack(1)”.

OPTIONS

-n , --dry-run
Do not remove anything; just report what it would remove.
-v , --verbose
Report all removed objects.
--progress
Show progress.
--expire <time>
Only expire loose objects older than <time>.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<head>…
In addition to objects reachable from any of our references, keep objects reachable from listed <head>s.

EXAMPLES

To prune objects not used by your repository or another that borrows from your repository via its .git/objects/info/alternates:

$ git prune $(cd ../another && git rev-parse --all)

NOTES

In most cases, users will not need to call git prune directly, but should instead call git gc, which handles pruning along with many other housekeeping tasks.

For a description of which objects are considered for pruning, see git fsck's --unreachable option.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-pull(1)

NAME

git-pull - Fetch from and integrate with another repository or a local branch

SYNOPSIS

git pull [<options>] [<repository> [<refspec>…]]

DESCRIPTION

Incorporates changes from a remote repository into the current branch. If the current branch is behind the remote, then by default it will fast-forward the current branch to match the remote. If the current branch and the remote have diverged, the user needs to specify how to reconcile the divergent branches with --rebase or --no-rebase (or the corresponding configuration option in pull.rebase).

More precisely, git pull runs git fetch with the given parameters and then depending on configuration options or command line flags, will call either git rebase or git merge to reconcile diverging branches.

<repository> should be the name of a remote repository as passed to the section called “git-fetch(1)”. <refspec> can name an arbitrary remote ref (for example, the name of a tag) or even a collection of refs with corresponding remote-tracking branches (e.g., refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*), but usually it is the name of a branch in the remote repository.

Default values for <repository> and <branch> are read from the "remote" and "merge" configuration for the current branch as set by the section called “git-branch(1)” --track.

Assume the following history exists and the current branch is "master":

          A---B---C master on origin
         /
    D---E---F---G master
        ^
        origin/master in your repository

Then "git pull" will fetch and replay the changes from the remote master branch since it diverged from the local master (i.e., E) until its current commit (C) on top of master and record the result in a new commit along with the names of the two parent commits and a log message from the user describing the changes.

          A---B---C origin/master
         /         \
    D---E---F---G---H master

See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details, including how conflicts are presented and handled.

In Git 1.7.0 or later, to cancel a conflicting merge, use git reset --merge. Warning: In older versions of Git, running git pull with uncommitted changes is discouraged: while possible, it leaves you in a state that may be hard to back out of in the case of a conflict.

If any of the remote changes overlap with local uncommitted changes, the merge will be automatically canceled and the work tree untouched. It is generally best to get any local changes in working order before pulling or stash them away with the section called “git-stash(1)”.

OPTIONS

-q , --quiet
This is passed to both underlying git-fetch to squelch reporting of during transfer, and underlying git-merge to squelch output during merging.
-v , --verbose
Pass --verbose to git-fetch and git-merge.
--[no-]recurse-submodules[=(yes|on-demand|no)]

This option controls if new commits of populated submodules should be fetched, and if the working trees of active submodules should be updated, too (see the section called “git-fetch(1)”, the section called “git-config(1)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

If the checkout is done via rebase, local submodule commits are rebased as well.

If the update is done via merge, the submodule conflicts are resolved and checked out.

Options related to merging

--commit , --no-commit

Perform the merge and commit the result. This option can be used to override --no-commit. Only useful when merging.

With --no-commit perform the merge and stop just before creating a merge commit, to give the user a chance to inspect and further tweak the merge result before committing.

Note that fast-forward updates do not create a merge commit and therefore there is no way to stop those merges with --no-commit. Thus, if you want to ensure your branch is not changed or updated by the merge command, use --no-ff with --no-commit.

--edit , -e , --no-edit

Invoke an editor before committing successful mechanical merge to further edit the auto-generated merge message, so that the user can explain and justify the merge. The --no-edit option can be used to accept the auto-generated message (this is generally discouraged).

Older scripts may depend on the historical behaviour of not allowing the user to edit the merge log message. They will see an editor opened when they run git merge. To make it easier to adjust such scripts to the updated behaviour, the environment variable GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT can be set to no at the beginning of them.

--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines how the merge message will be cleaned up before committing. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for more details. In addition, if the <mode> is given a value of scissors, scissors will be appended to MERGE_MSG before being passed on to the commit machinery in the case of a merge conflict.
--ff-only
Only update to the new history if there is no divergent local history. This is the default when no method for reconciling divergent histories is provided (via the --rebase=* flags).
--ff , --no-ff

When merging rather than rebasing, specifies how a merge is handled when the merged-in history is already a descendant of the current history. If merging is requested, --ff is the default unless merging an annotated (and possibly signed) tag that is not stored in its natural place in the refs/tags/ hierarchy, in which case --no-ff is assumed.

With --ff, when possible resolve the merge as a fast-forward (only update the branch pointer to match the merged branch; do not create a merge commit). When not possible (when the merged-in history is not a descendant of the current history), create a merge commit.

With --no-ff, create a merge commit in all cases, even when the merge could instead be resolved as a fast-forward.

-S[<key-id>] , --gpg-sign[=<key-id>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign the resulting merge commit. The <key-id> argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
--log[=<n>] , --no-log

In addition to branch names, populate the log message with one-line descriptions from at most <n> actual commits that are being merged. See also the section called “git-fmt-merge-msg(1)”. Only useful when merging.

With --no-log do not list one-line descriptions from the actual commits being merged.

--signoff , --no-signoff

Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the project to which you're committing. For example, it may certify that the committer has the rights to submit the work under the project's license or agrees to some contributor representation, such as a Developer Certificate of Origin. (See https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the Linux kernel and Git projects.) Consult the documentation or leadership of the project to which you're contributing to understand how the signoffs are used in that project.

The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff option on the command line.

--stat , -n , --no-stat

Show a diffstat at the end of the merge. The diffstat is also controlled by the configuration option merge.stat.

With -n or --no-stat do not show a diffstat at the end of the merge.

--squash , --no-squash

Produce the working tree and index state as if a real merge happened (except for the merge information), but do not actually make a commit, move the HEAD, or record $GIT_DIR/MERGE_HEAD (to cause the next git commit command to create a merge commit). This allows you to create a single commit on top of the current branch whose effect is the same as merging another branch (or more in case of an octopus).

With --no-squash perform the merge and commit the result. This option can be used to override --squash.

With --squash, --commit is not allowed, and will fail.

Only useful when merging.

--[no-]verify
By default, the pre-merge and commit-msg hooks are run. When --no-verify is given, these are bypassed. See also the section called “githooks(5)”. Only useful when merging.
-s <strategy> , --strategy=<strategy>
Use the given merge strategy; can be supplied more than once to specify them in the order they should be tried. If there is no -s option, a built-in list of strategies is used instead (ort when merging a single head, octopus otherwise).
-X <option> , --strategy-option=<option>
Pass merge strategy specific option through to the merge strategy.
--verify-signatures , --no-verify-signatures

Verify that the tip commit of the side branch being merged is signed with a valid key, i.e. a key that has a valid uid: in the default trust model, this means the signing key has been signed by a trusted key. If the tip commit of the side branch is not signed with a valid key, the merge is aborted.

Only useful when merging.

--summary , --no-summary
Synonyms to --stat and --no-stat; these are deprecated and will be removed in the future.
--autostash , --no-autostash
Automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, record it in the ref MERGE_AUTOSTASH and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run the operation on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts.
--allow-unrelated-histories

By default, git merge command refuses to merge histories that do not share a common ancestor. This option can be used to override this safety when merging histories of two projects that started their lives independently. As that is a very rare occasion, no configuration variable to enable this by default exists or will be added.

Only useful when merging.

-r , --rebase[=(false|true|merges|interactive)]

When true, rebase the current branch on top of the upstream branch after fetching. If there is a remote-tracking branch corresponding to the upstream branch and the upstream branch was rebased since last fetched, the rebase uses that information to avoid rebasing non-local changes.

When set to merges, rebase using git rebase --rebase-merges so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see the section called “git-rebase(1)” for details).

When false, merge the upstream branch into the current branch.

When interactive, enable the interactive mode of rebase.

See pull.rebase, branch.<name>.rebase and branch.autoSetupRebase in the section called “git-config(1)” if you want to make git pull always use --rebase instead of merging.

Note

This is a potentially dangerous mode of operation. It rewrites history, which does not bode well when you published that history already. Do not use this option unless you have read the section called “git-rebase(1)” carefully.

--no-rebase
This is shorthand for --rebase=false.

Options related to fetching

--[no-]all
Fetch all remotes, except for the ones that has the remote.<name>.skipFetchAll configuration variable set. This overrides the configuration variable fetch.all`.
-a , --append
Append ref names and object names of fetched refs to the existing contents of .git/FETCH_HEAD. Without this option old data in .git/FETCH_HEAD will be overwritten.
--atomic
Use an atomic transaction to update local refs. Either all refs are updated, or on error, no refs are updated.
--depth=<depth>
Limit fetching to the specified number of commits from the tip of each remote branch history. If fetching to a shallow repository created by git clone with --depth=<depth> option (see the section called “git-clone(1)”), deepen or shorten the history to the specified number of commits. Tags for the deepened commits are not fetched.
--deepen=<depth>
Similar to --depth, except it specifies the number of commits from the current shallow boundary instead of from the tip of each remote branch history.
--shallow-since=<date>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to include all reachable commits after <date>.
--shallow-exclude=<ref>
Deepen or shorten the history of a shallow repository to exclude commits reachable from a specified remote branch or tag. This option can be specified multiple times.
--unshallow

If the source repository is complete, convert a shallow repository to a complete one, removing all the limitations imposed by shallow repositories.

If the source repository is shallow, fetch as much as possible so that the current repository has the same history as the source repository.

--update-shallow
By default when fetching from a shallow repository, git fetch refuses refs that require updating .git/shallow. This option updates .git/shallow and accepts such refs.
--negotiation-tip=<commit|glob>

By default, Git will report, to the server, commits reachable from all local refs to find common commits in an attempt to reduce the size of the to-be-received packfile. If specified, Git will only report commits reachable from the given tips. This is useful to speed up fetches when the user knows which local ref is likely to have commits in common with the upstream ref being fetched.

This option may be specified more than once; if so, Git will report commits reachable from any of the given commits.

The argument to this option may be a glob on ref names, a ref, or the (possibly abbreviated) SHA-1 of a commit. Specifying a glob is equivalent to specifying this option multiple times, one for each matching ref name.

See also the fetch.negotiationAlgorithm and push.negotiate configuration variables documented in the section called “git-config(1)”, and the --negotiate-only option below.

--negotiate-only

Do not fetch anything from the server, and instead print the ancestors of the provided --negotiation-tip=* arguments, which we have in common with the server.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand]. Internally this is used to implement the push.negotiate option, see the section called “git-config(1)”.

--dry-run
Show what would be done, without making any changes.
--porcelain

Print the output to standard output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. See section OUTPUT in the section called “git-fetch(1)” for details.

This is incompatible with --recurse-submodules=[yes|on-demand] and takes precedence over the fetch.output config option.

-f , --force
When git fetch is used with <src>:<dst> refspec, it may refuse to update the local branch as discussed in the <refspec> part of the the section called “git-fetch(1)” documentation. This option overrides that check.
-k , --keep
Keep downloaded pack.
--prefetch
Modify the configured refspec to place all refs into the refs/prefetch/ namespace. See the prefetch task in the section called “git-maintenance(1)”.
-p , --prune
Before fetching, remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote. Tags are not subject to pruning if they are fetched only because of the default tag auto-following or due to a --tags option. However, if tags are fetched due to an explicit refspec (either on the command line or in the remote configuration, for example if the remote was cloned with the --mirror option), then they are also subject to pruning. Supplying --prune-tags is a shorthand for providing the tag refspec.
--no-tags
By default, tags that point at objects that are downloaded from the remote repository are fetched and stored locally. This option disables this automatic tag following. The default behavior for a remote may be specified with the remote.<name>.tagOpt setting. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--refmap=<refspec>
When fetching refs listed on the command line, use the specified refspec (can be given more than once) to map the refs to remote-tracking branches, instead of the values of remote.*.fetch configuration variables for the remote repository. Providing an empty <refspec> to the --refmap option causes Git to ignore the configured refspecs and rely entirely on the refspecs supplied as command-line arguments. See section on "Configured Remote-tracking Branches" for details.
-t , --tags
Fetch all tags from the remote (i.e., fetch remote tags refs/tags/* into local tags with the same name), in addition to whatever else would otherwise be fetched. Using this option alone does not subject tags to pruning, even if --prune is used (though tags may be pruned anyway if they are also the destination of an explicit refspec; see --prune).
-j , --jobs=<n>

Number of parallel children to be used for all forms of fetching.

If the --multiple option was specified, the different remotes will be fetched in parallel. If multiple submodules are fetched, they will be fetched in parallel. To control them independently, use the config settings fetch.parallel and submodule.fetchJobs (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

Typically, parallel recursive and multi-remote fetches will be faster. By default fetches are performed sequentially, not in parallel.

--set-upstream
If the remote is fetched successfully, add upstream (tracking) reference, used by argument-less the section called “git-pull(1)” and other commands. For more information, see branch.<name>.merge and branch.<name>.remote in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--upload-pack <upload-pack>
When given, and the repository to fetch from is handled by git fetch-pack, --exec=<upload-pack> is passed to the command to specify non-default path for the command run on the other end.
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
-o <option> , --server-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server when communicating using protocol version 2. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF character. The server's handling of server options, including unknown ones, is server-specific. When multiple --server-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the other side in the order listed on the command line. When no --server-option=<option> is given from the command line, the values of configuration variable remote.<name>.serverOption are used instead.
--show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch. This can be disabled through fetch.showForcedUpdates, but the --show-forced-updates option guarantees this check occurs. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--no-show-forced-updates
By default, git checks if a branch is force-updated during fetch. Pass --no-show-forced-updates or set fetch.showForcedUpdates to false to skip this check for performance reasons. If used during git-pull the --ff-only option will still check for forced updates before attempting a fast-forward update. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
-4 , --ipv4
Use IPv4 addresses only, ignoring IPv6 addresses.
-6 , --ipv6
Use IPv6 addresses only, ignoring IPv4 addresses.
<repository>
The "remote" repository that is the source of a fetch or pull operation. This parameter can be either a URL (see the section GIT URLS below) or the name of a remote (see the section REMOTES below).
<refspec>

Specifies which refs to fetch and which local refs to update. When no <refspec>s appear on the command line, the refs to fetch are read from remote.<repository>.fetch variables instead (see the section "CONFIGURED REMOTE-TRACKING BRANCHES" in the section called “git-fetch(1)”).

The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by the destination <dst>. The colon can be omitted when <dst> is empty. <src> is typically a ref, or a glob pattern with a single * that is used to match a set of refs, but it can also be a fully spelled hex object name.

A <refspec> may contain a * in its <src> to indicate a simple pattern match. Such a refspec functions like a glob that matches any ref with the pattern. A pattern <refspec> must have one and only one * in both the <src> and <dst>. It will map refs to the destination by replacing the * with the contents matched from the source.

If a refspec is prefixed by ^, it will be interpreted as a negative refspec. Rather than specifying which refs to fetch or which local refs to update, such a refspec will instead specify refs to exclude. A ref will be considered to match if it matches at least one positive refspec, and does not match any negative refspec. Negative refspecs can be useful to restrict the scope of a pattern refspec so that it will not include specific refs. Negative refspecs can themselves be pattern refspecs. However, they may only contain a <src> and do not specify a <dst>. Fully spelled out hex object names are also not supported.

tag <tag> means the same as refs/tags/<tag>:refs/tags/<tag>; it requests fetching everything up to the given tag.

The remote ref that matches <src> is fetched, and if <dst> is not an empty string, an attempt is made to update the local ref that matches it.

Whether that update is allowed without --force depends on the ref namespace it's being fetched to, the type of object being fetched, and whether the update is considered to be a fast-forward. Generally, the same rules apply for fetching as when pushing, see the <refspec>... section of the section called “git-push(1)” for what those are. Exceptions to those rules particular to git fetch are noted below.

Until Git version 2.20, and unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, any updates to refs/tags/* would be accepted without + in the refspec (or --force). When fetching, we promiscuously considered all tag updates from a remote to be forced fetches. Since Git version 2.20, fetching to update refs/tags/* works the same way as when pushing. I.e. any updates will be rejected without + in the refspec (or --force).

Unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, any updates outside of refs/{tags,heads}/* will be accepted without + in the refspec (or --force), whether that's swapping e.g. a tree object for a blob, or a commit for another commit that doesn't have the previous commit as an ancestor etc.

Unlike when pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, there is no configuration which'll amend these rules, and nothing like a pre-fetch hook analogous to the pre-receive hook.

As with pushing with the section called “git-push(1)”, all of the rules described above about what's not allowed as an update can be overridden by adding an optional leading + to a refspec (or using the --force command line option). The only exception to this is that no amount of forcing will make the refs/heads/* namespace accept a non-commit object.

Note

When the remote branch you want to fetch is known to be rewound and rebased regularly, it is expected that its new tip will not be a descendant of its previous tip (as stored in your remote-tracking branch the last time you fetched). You would want to use the + sign to indicate non-fast-forward updates will be needed for such branches. There is no way to determine or declare that a branch will be made available in a repository with this behavior; the pulling user simply must know this is the expected usage pattern for a branch.

Note

There is a difference between listing multiple <refspec> directly on git pull command line and having multiple remote.<repository>.fetch entries in your configuration for a <repository> and running a git pull command without any explicit <refspec> parameters. <refspec>s listed explicitly on the command line are always merged into the current branch after fetching. In other words, if you list more than one remote ref, git pull will create an Octopus merge. On the other hand, if you do not list any explicit <refspec> parameter on the command line, git pull will fetch all the <refspec>s it finds in the remote.<repository>.fetch configuration and merge only the first <refspec> found into the current branch. This is because making an Octopus from remote refs is rarely done, while keeping track of multiple remote heads in one-go by fetching more than one is often useful.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository. Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and deprecated; do not use them).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • http[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • ftp[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:

  • [<user>@]<host>:/<path-to-git-repo>

This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a colon. For example the local path foo:bar could be specified as an absolute path or ./foo:bar to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh url.

The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~<username> expansion:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • [<user>@]<host>:~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following syntaxes may be used:

  • /path/to/repo.git/
  • file:///path/to/repo.git/

These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except when cloning, when the former implies --local option. See the section called “git-clone(1)” for details.

git clone, git fetch and git pull, but not git push, will also accept a suitable bundle file. See the section called “git-bundle(1)”.

When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it attempts to use the remote-<transport> remote helper, if one exists. To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax may be used:

  • <transport>::<address>

where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being invoked. See the section called “gitremote-helpers(7)” for details.

If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories and you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs you use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                insteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "git://git.host.xz/"]
                insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
                insteadOf = work:

a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be "git://git.host.xz/repo.git".

If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                pushInsteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "ssh://example.org/"]
                pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/

a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to "ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still use the original URL.

REMOTES

The name of one of the following can be used instead of a URL as <repository> argument:

  • a remote in the Git configuration file: $GIT_DIR/config,
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/remotes directory, or
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/branches directory.

All of these also allow you to omit the refspec from the command line because they each contain a refspec which git will use by default.

Named remote in configuration file

You can choose to provide the name of a remote which you had previously configured using the section called “git-remote(1)”, the section called “git-config(1)” or even by a manual edit to the $GIT_DIR/config file. The URL of this remote will be used to access the repository. The refspec of this remote will be used by default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. The entry in the config file would appear like this:

        [remote "<name>"]
                url = <URL>
                pushurl = <pushurl>
                push = <refspec>
                fetch = <refspec>

The <pushurl> is used for pushes only. It is optional and defaults to <URL>. Pushing to a remote affects all defined pushurls or all defined urls if no pushurls are defined. Fetch, however, will only fetch from the first defined url if multiple urls are defined.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/remotes

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/remotes. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. The refspec in this file will be used as default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. This file should have the following format:

        URL: one of the above URL formats
        Push: <refspec>
        Pull: <refspec>

Push: lines are used by git push and Pull: lines are used by git pull and git fetch. Multiple Push: and Pull: lines may be specified for additional branch mappings.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/branches

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/branches. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. This file should have the following format:

        <URL>#<head>

<URL> is required; #<head> is optional.

Depending on the operation, git will use one of the following refspecs, if you don't provide one on the command line. <branch> is the name of this file in $GIT_DIR/branches and <head> defaults to master.

git fetch uses:

        refs/heads/<head>:refs/heads/<branch>

git push uses:

        HEAD:refs/heads/<head>

MERGE STRATEGIES

The merge mechanism (git merge and git pull commands) allows the backend merge strategies to be chosen with -s option. Some strategies can also take their own options, which can be passed by giving -X<option> arguments to git merge and/or git pull.

ort

This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch. This strategy can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm. When there is more than one common ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mismerges by tests done on actual merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this strategy can detect and handle merges involving renames. It does not make use of detected copies. The name for this algorithm is an acronym ("Ostensibly Recursive's Twin") and came from the fact that it was written as a replacement for the previous default algorithm, recursive.

In the case where the path is a submodule, if the submodule commit used on one side of the merge is a descendant of the submodule commit used on the other side of the merge, Git attempts to fast-forward to the descendant. Otherwise, Git will treat this case as a conflict, suggesting as a resolution a submodule commit that is descendant of the conflicting ones, if one exists.

The ort strategy can take the following options:

ours

This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by favoring our version. Changes from the other tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected in the merge result. For a binary file, the entire contents are taken from our side.

This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy, which does not even look at what the other tree contains at all. It discards everything the other tree did, declaring our history contains all that happened in it.

theirs
This is the opposite of ours; note that, unlike ours, there is no theirs merge strategy to confuse this merge option with.
ignore-space-change , ignore-all-space , ignore-space-at-eol , ignore-cr-at-eol

Treats lines with the indicated type of whitespace change as unchanged for the sake of a three-way merge. Whitespace changes mixed with other changes to a line are not ignored. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” -b, -w, --ignore-space-at-eol, and --ignore-cr-at-eol.

  • If their version only introduces whitespace changes to a line, our version is used;
  • If our version introduces whitespace changes but their version includes a substantial change, their version is used;
  • Otherwise, the merge proceeds in the usual way.
renormalize
This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages of any file which needs a three-way merge. This option is meant to be used when merging branches with different clean filters or end-of-line normalization rules. See "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
no-renormalize
Disables the renormalize option. This overrides the merge.renormalize configuration variable.
find-renames[=<n>]
Turn on rename detection, optionally setting the similarity threshold. This is the default. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --find-renames.
rename-threshold=<n>
Deprecated synonym for find-renames=<n>.
no-renames
Turn off rename detection. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --no-renames.
histogram
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=histogram.
patience
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=patience.
diff-algorithm=(histogram|minimal|myers|patience)
Use a different diff algorithm while merging, which can help avoid mismerges that occur due to unimportant matching lines (such as braces from distinct functions). See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --diff-algorithm. Note that ort defaults to diff-algorithm=histogram, while regular diffs currently default to the diff.algorithm config setting.
subtree[=<path>]
This option is a more advanced form of subtree strategy, where the strategy makes a guess on how two trees must be shifted to match with each other when merging. Instead, the specified path is prefixed (or stripped from the beginning) to make the shape of two trees to match.
recursive
This is now a synonym for ort. It was an alternative implementation until v2.49.0, but was redirected to mean ort in v2.50.0. The previous recursive strategy was the default strategy for resolving two heads from Git v0.99.9k until v2.33.0.
resolve
This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and another branch you pulled from) using a 3-way merge algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge ambiguities. It does not handle renames.
octopus
This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do a complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads together. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than one branch.
ours
This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note that this is different from the -Xours option to the ort merge strategy.
subtree
This is a modified ort strategy. When merging trees A and B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common ancestor tree.

With the strategies that use 3-way merge (including the default, ort), if a change is made on both branches, but later reverted on one of the branches, that change will be present in the merged result; some people find this behavior confusing. It occurs because only the heads and the merge base are considered when performing a merge, not the individual commits. The merge algorithm therefore considers the reverted change as no change at all, and substitutes the changed version instead.

DEFAULT BEHAVIOUR

Often people use git pull without giving any parameter. Traditionally, this has been equivalent to saying git pull origin. However, when configuration branch.<name>.remote is present while on branch <name>, that value is used instead of origin.

In order to determine what URL to use to fetch from, the value of the configuration remote.<origin>.url is consulted and if there is not any such variable, the value on the URL: line in $GIT_DIR/remotes/<origin> is used.

In order to determine what remote branches to fetch (and optionally store in the remote-tracking branches) when the command is run without any refspec parameters on the command line, values of the configuration variable remote.<origin>.fetch are consulted, and if there aren't any, $GIT_DIR/remotes/<origin> is consulted and its Pull: lines are used. In addition to the refspec formats described in the OPTIONS section, you can have a globbing refspec that looks like this:

refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

A globbing refspec must have a non-empty RHS (i.e. must store what were fetched in remote-tracking branches), and its LHS and RHS must end with /*. The above specifies that all remote branches are tracked using remote-tracking branches in refs/remotes/origin/ hierarchy under the same name.

The rule to determine which remote branch to merge after fetching is a bit involved, in order not to break backward compatibility.

If explicit refspecs were given on the command line of git pull, they are all merged.

When no refspec was given on the command line, then git pull uses the refspec from the configuration or $GIT_DIR/remotes/<origin>. In such cases, the following rules apply:

  1. If branch.<name>.merge configuration for the current branch <name> exists, that is the name of the branch at the remote site that is merged.
  2. If the refspec is a globbing one, nothing is merged.
  3. Otherwise the remote branch of the first refspec is merged.

EXAMPLES

  • Update the remote-tracking branches for the repository you cloned from, then merge one of them into your current branch:

    $ git pull
    $ git pull origin

    Normally the branch merged in is the HEAD of the remote repository, but the choice is determined by the branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge options; see the section called “git-config(1)” for details.

  • Merge into the current branch the remote branch next:

    $ git pull origin next

    This leaves a copy of next temporarily in FETCH_HEAD, and updates the remote-tracking branch origin/next. The same can be done by invoking fetch and merge:

    $ git fetch origin
    $ git merge origin/next

If you tried a pull which resulted in complex conflicts and would want to start over, you can recover with git reset.

SECURITY

The fetch and push protocols are not designed to prevent one side from stealing data from the other repository that was not intended to be shared. If you have private data that you need to protect from a malicious peer, your best option is to store it in another repository. This applies to both clients and servers. In particular, namespaces on a server are not effective for read access control; you should only grant read access to a namespace to clients that you would trust with read access to the entire repository.

The known attack vectors are as follows:

  1. The victim sends "have" lines advertising the IDs of objects it has that are not explicitly intended to be shared but can be used to optimize the transfer if the peer also has them. The attacker chooses an object ID X to steal and sends a ref to X, but isn't required to send the content of X because the victim already has it. Now the victim believes that the attacker has X, and it sends the content of X back to the attacker later. (This attack is most straightforward for a client to perform on a server, by creating a ref to X in the namespace the client has access to and then fetching it. The most likely way for a server to perform it on a client is to "merge" X into a public branch and hope that the user does additional work on this branch and pushes it back to the server without noticing the merge.)
  2. As in #1, the attacker chooses an object ID X to steal. The victim sends an object Y that the attacker already has, and the attacker falsely claims to have X and not Y, so the victim sends Y as a delta against X. The delta reveals regions of X that are similar to Y to the attacker.

BUGS

Using --recurse-submodules can only fetch new commits in already checked out submodules right now. When e.g. upstream added a new submodule in the just fetched commits of the superproject the submodule itself cannot be fetched, making it impossible to check out that submodule later without having to do a fetch again. This is expected to be fixed in a future Git version.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-push(1)

NAME

git-push - Update remote refs along with associated objects

SYNOPSIS

git push [--all | --branches | --mirror | --tags] [--follow-tags] [--atomic] [-n | --dry-run] [--receive-pack=<git-receive-pack>]
           [--repo=<repository>] [-f | --force] [-d | --delete] [--prune] [-q | --quiet] [-v | --verbose]
           [-u | --set-upstream] [-o <string> | --push-option=<string>]
           [--[no-]signed|--signed=(true|false|if-asked)]
           [--force-with-lease[=<refname>[:<expect>]] [--force-if-includes]]
           [--no-verify] [<repository> [<refspec>…]]

DESCRIPTION

Updates remote refs using local refs, while sending objects necessary to complete the given refs.

You can make interesting things happen to a repository every time you push into it, by setting up hooks there. See documentation for the section called “git-receive-pack(1)”.

When the command line does not specify where to push with the <repository> argument, branch.*.remote configuration for the current branch is consulted to determine where to push. If the configuration is missing, it defaults to origin.

When the command line does not specify what to push with <refspec>... arguments or --all, --mirror, --tags options, the command finds the default <refspec> by consulting remote.*.push configuration, and if it is not found, honors push.default configuration to decide what to push (See the section called “git-config(1)” for the meaning of push.default).

When neither the command-line nor the configuration specifies what to push, the default behavior is used, which corresponds to the simple value for push.default: the current branch is pushed to the corresponding upstream branch, but as a safety measure, the push is aborted if the upstream branch does not have the same name as the local one.

OPTIONS

<repository>
The "remote" repository that is the destination of a push operation. This parameter can be either a URL (see the section GIT URLS below) or the name of a remote (see the section REMOTES below).
<refspec>…

Specify what destination ref to update with what source object. The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source object <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by the destination ref <dst>.

The <src> is often the name of the branch you would want to push, but it can be any arbitrary "SHA-1 expression", such as master~4 or HEAD (see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”).

The <dst> tells which ref on the remote side is updated with this push. Arbitrary expressions cannot be used here, an actual ref must be named. If git push [<repository>] without any <refspec> argument is set to update some ref at the destination with <src> with remote.<repository>.push configuration variable, :<dst> part can be omitted--such a push will update a ref that <src> normally updates without any <refspec> on the command line. Otherwise, missing :<dst> means to update the same ref as the <src>.

If <dst> doesn't start with refs/ (e.g. refs/heads/master) we will try to infer where in refs/* on the destination <repository> it belongs based on the type of <src> being pushed and whether <dst> is ambiguous.

  • If <dst> unambiguously refers to a ref on the <repository> remote, then push to that ref.
  • If <src> resolves to a ref starting with refs/heads/ or refs/tags/, then prepend that to <dst>.
  • Other ambiguity resolutions might be added in the future, but for now any other cases will error out with an error indicating what we tried, and depending on the advice.pushUnqualifiedRefname configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”) suggest what refs/ namespace you may have wanted to push to.

The object referenced by <src> is used to update the <dst> reference on the remote side. Whether this is allowed depends on where in refs/* the <dst> reference lives as described in detail below, in those sections "update" means any modifications except deletes, which as noted after the next few sections are treated differently.

The refs/heads/* namespace will only accept commit objects, and updates only if they can be fast-forwarded.

The refs/tags/* namespace will accept any kind of object (as commits, trees and blobs can be tagged), and any updates to them will be rejected.

It's possible to push any type of object to any namespace outside of refs/{tags,heads}/*. In the case of tags and commits, these will be treated as if they were the commits inside refs/heads/* for the purposes of whether the update is allowed.

I.e. a fast-forward of commits and tags outside refs/{tags,heads}/* is allowed, even in cases where what's being fast-forwarded is not a commit, but a tag object which happens to point to a new commit which is a fast-forward of the commit the last tag (or commit) it's replacing. Replacing a tag with an entirely different tag is also allowed, if it points to the same commit, as well as pushing a peeled tag, i.e. pushing the commit that existing tag object points to, or a new tag object which an existing commit points to.

Tree and blob objects outside of refs/{tags,heads}/* will be treated the same way as if they were inside refs/tags/*, any update of them will be rejected.

All of the rules described above about what's not allowed as an update can be overridden by adding an the optional leading + to a refspec (or using --force command line option). The only exception to this is that no amount of forcing will make the refs/heads/* namespace accept a non-commit object. Hooks and configuration can also override or amend these rules, see e.g. receive.denyNonFastForwards in the section called “git-config(1)” and pre-receive and update in the section called “githooks(5)”.

Pushing an empty <src> allows you to delete the <dst> ref from the remote repository. Deletions are always accepted without a leading + in the refspec (or --force), except when forbidden by configuration or hooks. See receive.denyDeletes in the section called “git-config(1)” and pre-receive and update in the section called “githooks(5)”.

The special refspec : (or +: to allow non-fast-forward updates) directs Git to push "matching" branches: for every branch that exists on the local side, the remote side is updated if a branch of the same name already exists on the remote side.

tag <tag> means the same as refs/tags/<tag>:refs/tags/<tag>.

--all , --branches
Push all branches (i.e. refs under refs/heads/); cannot be used with other <refspec>.
--prune
Remove remote branches that don't have a local counterpart. For example a remote branch tmp will be removed if a local branch with the same name doesn't exist any more. This also respects refspecs, e.g. git push --prune remote refs/heads/*:refs/tmp/* would make sure that remote refs/tmp/foo will be removed if refs/heads/foo doesn't exist.
--mirror
Instead of naming each ref to push, specifies that all refs under refs/ (which includes but is not limited to refs/heads/, refs/remotes/, and refs/tags/) be mirrored to the remote repository. Newly created local refs will be pushed to the remote end, locally updated refs will be force updated on the remote end, and deleted refs will be removed from the remote end. This is the default if the configuration option remote.<remote>.mirror is set.
-n , --dry-run
Do everything except actually send the updates.
--porcelain
Produce machine-readable output. The output status line for each ref will be tab-separated and sent to stdout instead of stderr. The full symbolic names of the refs will be given.
-d , --delete
All listed refs are deleted from the remote repository. This is the same as prefixing all refs with a colon.
--tags
All refs under refs/tags are pushed, in addition to refspecs explicitly listed on the command line.
--follow-tags
Push all the refs that would be pushed without this option, and also push annotated tags in refs/tags that are missing from the remote but are pointing at commit-ish that are reachable from the refs being pushed. This can also be specified with configuration variable push.followTags. For more information, see push.followTags in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--[no-]signed , --signed=(true|false|if-asked)
GPG-sign the push request to update refs on the receiving side, to allow it to be checked by the hooks and/or be logged. If false or --no-signed, no signing will be attempted. If true or --signed, the push will fail if the server does not support signed pushes. If set to if-asked, sign if and only if the server supports signed pushes. The push will also fail if the actual call to gpg --sign fails. See the section called “git-receive-pack(1)” for the details on the receiving end.
--[no-]atomic
Use an atomic transaction on the remote side if available. Either all refs are updated, or on error, no refs are updated. If the server does not support atomic pushes the push will fail.
-o <option> , --push-option=<option>
Transmit the given string to the server, which passes them to the pre-receive as well as the post-receive hook. The given string must not contain a NUL or LF character. When multiple --push-option=<option> are given, they are all sent to the other side in the order listed on the command line. When no --push-option=<option> is given from the command line, the values of configuration variable push.pushOption are used instead.
--receive-pack=<git-receive-pack> , --exec=<git-receive-pack>
Path to the git-receive-pack program on the remote end. Sometimes useful when pushing to a remote repository over ssh, and you do not have the program in a directory on the default $PATH.
--[no-]force-with-lease , --force-with-lease=<refname> , --force-with-lease=<refname>:<expect>

Usually, "git push" refuses to update a remote ref that is not an ancestor of the local ref used to overwrite it.

This option overrides this restriction if the current value of the remote ref is the expected value. "git push" fails otherwise.

Imagine that you have to rebase what you have already published. You will have to bypass the "must fast-forward" rule in order to replace the history you originally published with the rebased history. If somebody else built on top of your original history while you are rebasing, the tip of the branch at the remote may advance with their commit, and blindly pushing with --force will lose their work.

This option allows you to say that you expect the history you are updating is what you rebased and want to replace. If the remote ref still points at the commit you specified, you can be sure that no other people did anything to the ref. It is like taking a "lease" on the ref without explicitly locking it, and the remote ref is updated only if the "lease" is still valid.

--force-with-lease alone, without specifying the details, will protect all remote refs that are going to be updated by requiring their current value to be the same as the remote-tracking branch we have for them.

--force-with-lease=<refname>, without specifying the expected value, will protect the named ref (alone), if it is going to be updated, by requiring its current value to be the same as the remote-tracking branch we have for it.

--force-with-lease=<refname>:<expect> will protect the named ref (alone), if it is going to be updated, by requiring its current value to be the same as the specified value <expect> (which is allowed to be different from the remote-tracking branch we have for the refname, or we do not even have to have such a remote-tracking branch when this form is used). If <expect> is the empty string, then the named ref must not already exist.

Note that all forms other than --force-with-lease=<refname>:<expect> that specifies the expected current value of the ref explicitly are still experimental and their semantics may change as we gain experience with this feature.

"--no-force-with-lease" will cancel all the previous --force-with-lease on the command line.

A general note on safety: supplying this option without an expected value, i.e. as --force-with-lease or --force-with-lease=<refname> interacts very badly with anything that implicitly runs git fetch on the remote to be pushed to in the background, e.g. git fetch origin on your repository in a cronjob.

The protection it offers over --force is ensuring that subsequent changes your work wasn't based on aren't clobbered, but this is trivially defeated if some background process is updating refs in the background. We don't have anything except the remote tracking info to go by as a heuristic for refs you're expected to have seen & are willing to clobber.

If your editor or some other system is running git fetch in the background for you a way to mitigate this is to simply set up another remote:

git remote add origin-push $(git config remote.origin.url)
git fetch origin-push

Now when the background process runs git fetch origin the references on origin-push won't be updated, and thus commands like:

git push --force-with-lease origin-push

Will fail unless you manually run git fetch origin-push. This method is of course entirely defeated by something that runs git fetch --all, in that case you'd need to either disable it or do something more tedious like:

git fetch              # update 'master' from remote
git tag base master    # mark our base point
git rebase -i master   # rewrite some commits
git push --force-with-lease=master:base master:master

I.e. create a base tag for versions of the upstream code that you've seen and are willing to overwrite, then rewrite history, and finally force push changes to master if the remote version is still at base, regardless of what your local remotes/origin/master has been updated to in the background.

Alternatively, specifying --force-if-includes as an ancillary option along with --force-with-lease[=<refname>] (i.e., without saying what exact commit the ref on the remote side must be pointing at, or which refs on the remote side are being protected) at the time of "push" will verify if updates from the remote-tracking refs that may have been implicitly updated in the background are integrated locally before allowing a forced update.

-f , --force

Usually, the command refuses to update a remote ref that is not an ancestor of the local ref used to overwrite it. Also, when --force-with-lease option is used, the command refuses to update a remote ref whose current value does not match what is expected.

This flag disables these checks, and can cause the remote repository to lose commits; use it with care.

Note that --force applies to all the refs that are pushed, hence using it with push.default set to matching or with multiple push destinations configured with remote.*.push may overwrite refs other than the current branch (including local refs that are strictly behind their remote counterpart). To force a push to only one branch, use a + in front of the refspec to push (e.g git push origin +master to force a push to the master branch). See the <refspec>... section above for details.

--[no-]force-if-includes

Force an update only if the tip of the remote-tracking ref has been integrated locally.

This option enables a check that verifies if the tip of the remote-tracking ref is reachable from one of the "reflog" entries of the local branch based in it for a rewrite. The check ensures that any updates from the remote have been incorporated locally by rejecting the forced update if that is not the case.

If the option is passed without specifying --force-with-lease, or specified along with --force-with-lease=<refname>:<expect>, it is a "no-op".

Specifying --no-force-if-includes disables this behavior.

--repo=<repository>
This option is equivalent to the <repository> argument. If both are specified, the command-line argument takes precedence.
-u , --set-upstream
For every branch that is up to date or successfully pushed, add upstream (tracking) reference, used by argument-less the section called “git-pull(1)” and other commands. For more information, see branch.<name>.merge in the section called “git-config(1)”.
--[no-]thin
These options are passed to the section called “git-send-pack(1)”. A thin transfer significantly reduces the amount of sent data when the sender and receiver share many of the same objects in common. The default is --thin.
-q , --quiet
Suppress all output, including the listing of updated refs, unless an error occurs. Progress is not reported to the standard error stream.
-v , --verbose
Run verbosely.
--progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--no-recurse-submodules , --recurse-submodules=check|on-demand|only|no

May be used to make sure all submodule commits used by the revisions to be pushed are available on a remote-tracking branch. If check is used Git will verify that all submodule commits that changed in the revisions to be pushed are available on at least one remote of the submodule. If any commits are missing the push will be aborted and exit with non-zero status. If on-demand is used all submodules that changed in the revisions to be pushed will be pushed. If on-demand was not able to push all necessary revisions it will also be aborted and exit with non-zero status. If only is used all submodules will be pushed while the superproject is left unpushed. A value of no or using --no-recurse-submodules can be used to override the push.recurseSubmodules configuration variable when no submodule recursion is required.

When using on-demand or only, if a submodule has a "push.recurseSubmodules={on-demand,only}" or "submodule.recurse" configuration, further recursion will occur. In this case, "only" is treated as "on-demand".

--[no-]verify
Toggle the pre-push hook (see the section called “githooks(5)”). The default is --verify, giving the hook a chance to prevent the push. With --no-verify, the hook is bypassed completely.
-4 , --ipv4
Use IPv4 addresses only, ignoring IPv6 addresses.
-6 , --ipv6
Use IPv6 addresses only, ignoring IPv4 addresses.

GIT URLS

In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the address of the remote server, and the path to the repository. Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be absent.

Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and deprecated; do not use them).

The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and should be used with caution on unsecured networks.

The following syntaxes may be used with them:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • http[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>
  • ftp[s]://<host>[:<port>]/<path-to-git-repo>

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:

  • [<user>@]<host>:/<path-to-git-repo>

This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a colon. For example the local path foo:bar could be specified as an absolute path or ./foo:bar to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh url.

The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~<username> expansion:

  • ssh://[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • git://<host>[:<port>]/~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>
  • [<user>@]<host>:~<user>/<path-to-git-repo>

For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following syntaxes may be used:

  • /path/to/repo.git/
  • file:///path/to/repo.git/

These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except when cloning, when the former implies --local option. See the section called “git-clone(1)” for details.

git clone, git fetch and git pull, but not git push, will also accept a suitable bundle file. See the section called “git-bundle(1)”.

When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it attempts to use the remote-<transport> remote helper, if one exists. To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax may be used:

  • <transport>::<address>

where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being invoked. See the section called “gitremote-helpers(7)” for details.

If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories and you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs you use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                insteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "git://git.host.xz/"]
                insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
                insteadOf = work:

a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be "git://git.host.xz/repo.git".

If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a configuration section of the form:

        [url "<actual-url-base>"]
                pushInsteadOf = <other-url-base>

For example, with this:

        [url "ssh://example.org/"]
                pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/

a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to "ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still use the original URL.

REMOTES

The name of one of the following can be used instead of a URL as <repository> argument:

  • a remote in the Git configuration file: $GIT_DIR/config,
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/remotes directory, or
  • a file in the $GIT_DIR/branches directory.

All of these also allow you to omit the refspec from the command line because they each contain a refspec which git will use by default.

Named remote in configuration file

You can choose to provide the name of a remote which you had previously configured using the section called “git-remote(1)”, the section called “git-config(1)” or even by a manual edit to the $GIT_DIR/config file. The URL of this remote will be used to access the repository. The refspec of this remote will be used by default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. The entry in the config file would appear like this:

        [remote "<name>"]
                url = <URL>
                pushurl = <pushurl>
                push = <refspec>
                fetch = <refspec>

The <pushurl> is used for pushes only. It is optional and defaults to <URL>. Pushing to a remote affects all defined pushurls or all defined urls if no pushurls are defined. Fetch, however, will only fetch from the first defined url if multiple urls are defined.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/remotes

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/remotes. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. The refspec in this file will be used as default when you do not provide a refspec on the command line. This file should have the following format:

        URL: one of the above URL formats
        Push: <refspec>
        Pull: <refspec>

Push: lines are used by git push and Pull: lines are used by git pull and git fetch. Multiple Push: and Pull: lines may be specified for additional branch mappings.

Named file in $GIT_DIR/branches

You can choose to provide the name of a file in $GIT_DIR/branches. The URL in this file will be used to access the repository. This file should have the following format:

        <URL>#<head>

<URL> is required; #<head> is optional.

Depending on the operation, git will use one of the following refspecs, if you don't provide one on the command line. <branch> is the name of this file in $GIT_DIR/branches and <head> defaults to master.

git fetch uses:

        refs/heads/<head>:refs/heads/<branch>

git push uses:

        HEAD:refs/heads/<head>

OUTPUT

The output of "git push" depends on the transport method used; this section describes the output when pushing over the Git protocol (either locally or via ssh).

The status of the push is output in tabular form, with each line representing the status of a single ref. Each line is of the form:

 <flag> <summary> <from> -> <to> (<reason>)

If --porcelain is used, then each line of the output is of the form:

 <flag> \t <from>:<to> \t <summary> (<reason>)

The status of up-to-date refs is shown only if --porcelain or --verbose option is used.

flag

A single character indicating the status of the ref:

(space)
for a successfully pushed fast-forward;
+
for a successful forced update;
-
for a successfully deleted ref;
*
for a successfully pushed new ref;
!
for a ref that was rejected or failed to push; and
=
for a ref that was up to date and did not need pushing.
summary

For a successfully pushed ref, the summary shows the old and new values of the ref in a form suitable for using as an argument to git log (this is <old>..<new> in most cases, and <old>...<new> for forced non-fast-forward updates).

For a failed update, more details are given:

rejected
Git did not try to send the ref at all, typically because it is not a fast-forward and you did not force the update.
remote rejected
The remote end refused the update. Usually caused by a hook on the remote side, or because the remote repository has one of the following safety options in effect: receive.denyCurrentBranch (for pushes to the checked out branch), receive.denyNonFastForwards (for forced non-fast-forward updates), receive.denyDeletes or receive.denyDeleteCurrent. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
remote failure
The remote end did not report the successful update of the ref, perhaps because of a temporary error on the remote side, a break in the network connection, or other transient error.
from
The name of the local ref being pushed, minus its refs/<type>/ prefix. In the case of deletion, the name of the local ref is omitted.
to
The name of the remote ref being updated, minus its refs/<type>/ prefix.
reason
A human-readable explanation. In the case of successfully pushed refs, no explanation is needed. For a failed ref, the reason for failure is described.

NOTE ABOUT FAST-FORWARDS

When an update changes a branch (or more in general, a ref) that used to point at commit A to point at another commit B, it is called a fast-forward update if and only if B is a descendant of A.

In a fast-forward update from A to B, the set of commits that the original commit A built on top of is a subset of the commits the new commit B builds on top of. Hence, it does not lose any history.

In contrast, a non-fast-forward update will lose history. For example, suppose you and somebody else started at the same commit X, and you built a history leading to commit B while the other person built a history leading to commit A. The history looks like this:

      B
     /
 ---X---A

Further suppose that the other person already pushed changes leading to A back to the original repository from which you two obtained the original commit X.

The push done by the other person updated the branch that used to point at commit X to point at commit A. It is a fast-forward.

But if you try to push, you will attempt to update the branch (that now points at A) with commit B. This does not fast-forward. If you did so, the changes introduced by commit A will be lost, because everybody will now start building on top of B.

The command by default does not allow an update that is not a fast-forward to prevent such loss of history.

If you do not want to lose your work (history from X to B) or the work by the other person (history from X to A), you would need to first fetch the history from the repository, create a history that contains changes done by both parties, and push the result back.

You can perform "git pull", resolve potential conflicts, and "git push" the result. A "git pull" will create a merge commit C between commits A and B.

      B---C
     /   /
 ---X---A

Updating A with the resulting merge commit will fast-forward and your push will be accepted.

Alternatively, you can rebase your change between X and B on top of A, with "git pull --rebase", and push the result back. The rebase will create a new commit D that builds the change between X and B on top of A.

      B   D
     /   /
 ---X---A

Again, updating A with this commit will fast-forward and your push will be accepted.

There is another common situation where you may encounter non-fast-forward rejection when you try to push, and it is possible even when you are pushing into a repository nobody else pushes into. After you push commit A yourself (in the first picture in this section), replace it with "git commit --amend" to produce commit B, and you try to push it out, because forgot that you have pushed A out already. In such a case, and only if you are certain that nobody in the meantime fetched your earlier commit A (and started building on top of it), you can run "git push --force" to overwrite it. In other words, "git push --force" is a method reserved for a case where you do mean to lose history.

EXAMPLES

git push
Works like git push <remote>, where <remote> is the current branch's remote (or origin, if no remote is configured for the current branch).
git push origin

Without additional configuration, pushes the current branch to the configured upstream (branch.<name>.merge configuration variable) if it has the same name as the current branch, and errors out without pushing otherwise.

The default behavior of this command when no <refspec> is given can be configured by setting the push option of the remote, or the push.default configuration variable.

For example, to default to pushing only the current branch to origin use git config remote.origin.push HEAD. Any valid <refspec> (like the ones in the examples below) can be configured as the default for git push origin.

git push origin :
Push "matching" branches to origin. See <refspec> in the OPTIONS section above for a description of "matching" branches.
git push origin master
Find a ref that matches master in the source repository (most likely, it would find refs/heads/master), and update the same ref (e.g. refs/heads/master) in origin repository with it. If master did not exist remotely, it would be created.
git push origin HEAD
A handy way to push the current branch to the same name on the remote.
git push mothership master:satellite/master dev:satellite/dev

Use the source ref that matches master (e.g. refs/heads/master) to update the ref that matches satellite/master (most probably refs/remotes/satellite/master) in the mothership repository; do the same for dev and satellite/dev.

See the section describing <refspec>... above for a discussion of the matching semantics.

This is to emulate git fetch run on the mothership using git push that is run in the opposite direction in order to integrate the work done on satellite, and is often necessary when you can only make connection in one way (i.e. satellite can ssh into mothership but mothership cannot initiate connection to satellite because the latter is behind a firewall or does not run sshd).

After running this git push on the satellite machine, you would ssh into the mothership and run git merge there to complete the emulation of git pull that were run on mothership to pull changes made on satellite.

git push origin HEAD:master
Push the current branch to the remote ref matching master in the origin repository. This form is convenient to push the current branch without thinking about its local name.
git push origin master:refs/heads/experimental
Create the branch experimental in the origin repository by copying the current master branch. This form is only needed to create a new branch or tag in the remote repository when the local name and the remote name are different; otherwise, the ref name on its own will work.
git push origin :experimental
Find a ref that matches experimental in the origin repository (e.g. refs/heads/experimental), and delete it.
git push origin +dev:master

Update the origin repository's master branch with the dev branch, allowing non-fast-forward updates. This can leave unreferenced commits dangling in the origin repository. Consider the following situation, where a fast-forward is not possible:

            o---o---o---A---B  origin/master
                     \
                      X---Y---Z  dev

The above command would change the origin repository to

                      A---B  (unnamed branch)
                     /
            o---o---o---X---Y---Z  master

Commits A and B would no longer belong to a branch with a symbolic name, and so would be unreachable. As such, these commits would be removed by a git gc command on the origin repository.

SECURITY

The fetch and push protocols are not designed to prevent one side from stealing data from the other repository that was not intended to be shared. If you have private data that you need to protect from a malicious peer, your best option is to store it in another repository. This applies to both clients and servers. In particular, namespaces on a server are not effective for read access control; you should only grant read access to a namespace to clients that you would trust with read access to the entire repository.

The known attack vectors are as follows:

  1. The victim sends "have" lines advertising the IDs of objects it has that are not explicitly intended to be shared but can be used to optimize the transfer if the peer also has them. The attacker chooses an object ID X to steal and sends a ref to X, but isn't required to send the content of X because the victim already has it. Now the victim believes that the attacker has X, and it sends the content of X back to the attacker later. (This attack is most straightforward for a client to perform on a server, by creating a ref to X in the namespace the client has access to and then fetching it. The most likely way for a server to perform it on a client is to "merge" X into a public branch and hope that the user does additional work on this branch and pushes it back to the server without noticing the merge.)
  2. As in #1, the attacker chooses an object ID X to steal. The victim sends an object Y that the attacker already has, and the attacker falsely claims to have X and not Y, so the victim sends Y as a delta against X. The delta reveals regions of X that are similar to Y to the attacker.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

push.autoSetupRemote
If set to "true" assume --set-upstream on default push when no upstream tracking exists for the current branch; this option takes effect with push.default options simple, upstream, and current. It is useful if by default you want new branches to be pushed to the default remote (like the behavior of push.default=current) and you also want the upstream tracking to be set. Workflows most likely to benefit from this option are simple central workflows where all branches are expected to have the same name on the remote.
push.default

Defines the action git push should take if no refspec is given (whether from the command-line, config, or elsewhere). Different values are well-suited for specific workflows; for instance, in a purely central workflow (i.e. the fetch source is equal to the push destination), upstream is probably what you want. Possible values are:

  • nothing - do not push anything (error out) unless a refspec is given. This is primarily meant for people who want to avoid mistakes by always being explicit.
  • current - push the current branch to update a branch with the same name on the receiving end. Works in both central and non-central workflows.
  • upstream - push the current branch back to the branch whose changes are usually integrated into the current branch (which is called @{upstream}). This mode only makes sense if you are pushing to the same repository you would normally pull from (i.e. central workflow).
  • tracking - This is a deprecated synonym for upstream.
  • simple - push the current branch with the same name on the remote.

    If you are working on a centralized workflow (pushing to the same repository you pull from, which is typically origin), then you need to configure an upstream branch with the same name.

    This mode is the default since Git 2.0, and is the safest option suited for beginners.

  • matching - push all branches having the same name on both ends. This makes the repository you are pushing to remember the set of branches that will be pushed out (e.g. if you always push maint and master there and no other branches, the repository you push to will have these two branches, and your local maint and master will be pushed there).

    To use this mode effectively, you have to make sure all the branches you would push out are ready to be pushed out before running git push, as the whole point of this mode is to allow you to push all of the branches in one go. If you usually finish work on only one branch and push out the result, while other branches are unfinished, this mode is not for you. Also this mode is not suitable for pushing into a shared central repository, as other people may add new branches there, or update the tip of existing branches outside your control.

    This used to be the default, but not since Git 2.0 (simple is the new default).

push.followTags
If set to true, enable --follow-tags option by default. You may override this configuration at time of push by specifying --no-follow-tags.
push.gpgSign
May be set to a boolean value, or the string if-asked. A true value causes all pushes to be GPG signed, as if --signed is passed to the section called “git-push(1)”. The string if-asked causes pushes to be signed if the server supports it, as if --signed=if-asked is passed to git push. A false value may override a value from a lower-priority config file. An explicit command-line flag always overrides this config option.
push.pushOption

When no --push-option=<option> argument is given from the command line, git push behaves as if each <value> of this variable is given as --push-option=<value>.

This is a multi-valued variable, and an empty value can be used in a higher priority configuration file (e.g. .git/config in a repository) to clear the values inherited from a lower priority configuration files (e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig).

Example:

/etc/gitconfig
  push.pushoption = a
  push.pushoption = b

~/.gitconfig
  push.pushoption = c

repo/.git/config
  push.pushoption =
  push.pushoption = b

This will result in only b (a and c are cleared).
push.recurseSubmodules
May be "check", "on-demand", "only", or "no", with the same behavior as that of "push --recurse-submodules". If not set, no is used by default, unless submodule.recurse is set (in which case a true value means on-demand).
push.useForceIfIncludes
If set to "true", it is equivalent to specifying --force-if-includes as an option to the section called “git-push(1)” in the command line. Adding --no-force-if-includes at the time of push overrides this configuration setting.
push.negotiate
If set to "true", attempt to reduce the size of the packfile sent by rounds of negotiation in which the client and the server attempt to find commits in common. If "false", Git will rely solely on the server's ref advertisement to find commits in common.
push.useBitmaps
If set to "false", disable use of bitmaps for "git push" even if pack.useBitmaps is "true", without preventing other git operations from using bitmaps. Default is true.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-quiltimport(1)

NAME

git-quiltimport - Applies a quilt patchset onto the current branch

SYNOPSIS

git quiltimport [--dry-run | -n] [--author <author>] [--patches <dir>]
                [--series <file>] [--keep-non-patch]

DESCRIPTION

Applies a quilt patchset onto the current Git branch, preserving the patch boundaries, patch order, and patch descriptions present in the quilt patchset.

For each patch the code attempts to extract the author from the patch description. If that fails it falls back to the author specified with --author. If the --author flag was not given the patch description is displayed and the user is asked to interactively enter the author of the patch.

If a subject is not found in the patch description the patch name is preserved as the 1 line subject in the Git description.

OPTIONS

-n , --dry-run
Walk through the patches in the series and warn if we cannot find all of the necessary information to commit a patch. At the time of this writing only missing author information is warned about.
--author Author Name <Author Email>
The author name and email address to use when no author information can be found in the patch description.
--patches <dir>

The directory to find the quilt patches.

The default for the patch directory is patches or the value of the $QUILT_PATCHES environment variable.

--series <file>

The quilt series file.

The default for the series file is <patches>/series or the value of the $QUILT_SERIES environment variable.

--keep-non-patch
Pass -b flag to git mailinfo (see the section called “git-mailinfo(1)”).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-range-diff(1)

NAME

git-range-diff - Compare two commit ranges (e.g. two versions of a branch)

SYNOPSIS

git range-diff [--color=[<when>]] [--no-color] [<diff-options>]
        [--no-dual-color] [--creation-factor=<factor>]
        [--left-only | --right-only] [--diff-merges=<format>]
        [--remerge-diff]
        ( <range1> <range2> | <rev1>…<rev2> | <base> <rev1> <rev2> )
        [[--] <path>…]

DESCRIPTION

This command shows the differences between two versions of a patch series, or more generally, two commit ranges (ignoring merge commits).

In the presence of <path> arguments, these commit ranges are limited accordingly.

To that end, it first finds pairs of commits from both commit ranges that correspond with each other. Two commits are said to correspond when the diff between their patches (i.e. the author information, the commit message and the commit diff) is reasonably small compared to the patches' size. See ``Algorithm`` below for details.

Finally, the list of matching commits is shown in the order of the second commit range, with unmatched commits being inserted just after all of their ancestors have been shown.

There are three ways to specify the commit ranges:

  • <range1> <range2>: Either commit range can be of the form <base>..<rev>, <rev>^! or <rev>^-<n>. See SPECIFYING RANGES in the section called “gitrevisions(7)” for more details.
  • <rev1>...<rev2>. This is equivalent to <rev2>..<rev1> <rev1>..<rev2>.
  • <base> <rev1> <rev2>: This is equivalent to <base>..<rev1> <base>..<rev2>.

OPTIONS

--no-dual-color

When the commit diffs differ, git range-diff` recreates the original diffs coloring, and adds outer -/+ diff markers with the background being red/green to make it easier to see e.g. when there was a change in what exact lines were added.

Additionally, the commit diff lines that are only present in the first commit range are shown "dimmed" (this can be overridden using the color.diff.<slot> config setting where <slot> is one of contextDimmed, oldDimmed and newDimmed), and the commit diff lines that are only present in the second commit range are shown in bold (which can be overridden using the config settings color.diff.<slot> with <slot> being one of contextBold, oldBold or newBold).

This is known to range-diff as "dual coloring". Use --no-dual-color to revert to color all lines according to the outer diff markers (and completely ignore the inner diff when it comes to color).

--creation-factor=<percent>
Set the creation/deletion cost fudge factor to <percent>. Defaults to 60. Try a larger value if git range-diff erroneously considers a large change a total rewrite (deletion of one commit and addition of another), and a smaller one in the reverse case. See the ``Algorithm`` section below for an explanation of why this is needed.
--left-only
Suppress commits that are missing from the first specified range (or the "left range" when using the <rev1>...<rev2> format).
--right-only
Suppress commits that are missing from the second specified range (or the "right range" when using the <rev1>...<rev2> format).
--diff-merges=<format>

Instead of ignoring merge commits, generate diffs for them using the corresponding --diff-merges=<format> option of the section called “git-log(1)”, and include them in the comparison.

Note: In the common case, the remerge mode will be the most natural one to use, as it shows only the diff on top of what Git's merge machinery would have produced. In other words, if a merge commit is the result of a non-conflicting git merge, the remerge mode will represent it with an empty diff.

--remerge-diff
Convenience option, equivalent to --diff-merges=remerge.
--[no-]notes[=<ref>]
This flag is passed to the git log program (see the section called “git-log(1)”) that generates the patches.
<range1> <range2>
Compare the commits specified by the two ranges, where <range1> is considered an older version of <range2>.
<rev1>…<rev2>
Equivalent to passing <rev2>..<rev1> and <rev1>..<rev2>.
<base> <rev1> <rev2>
Equivalent to passing <base>..<rev1> and <base>..<rev2>. Note that <base> does not need to be the exact branch point of the branches. Example: after rebasing a branch my-topic, git range-diff my-topic@{u} my-topic@{1} my-topic would show the differences introduced by the rebase.

git range-diff also accepts the regular diff options (see the section called “git-diff(1)”), most notably the --color=[<when>] and --no-color options. These options are used when generating the "diff between patches", i.e. to compare the author, commit message and diff of corresponding old/new commits. There is currently no means to tweak most of the diff options passed to git log when generating those patches.

OUTPUT STABILITY

The output of the range-diff command is subject to change. It is intended to be human-readable porcelain output, not something that can be used across versions of Git to get a textually stable range-diff (as opposed to something like the --stable option to the section called “git-patch-id(1)”). There's also no equivalent of the section called “git-apply(1)” for range-diff, the output is not intended to be machine-readable.

This is particularly true when passing in diff options. Currently some options like --stat can, as an emergent effect, produce output that's quite useless in the context of range-diff. Future versions of range-diff may learn to interpret such options in a manner specific to range-diff (e.g. for --stat producing human-readable output which summarizes how the diffstat changed).

CONFIGURATION

This command uses the diff.color.* and pager.range-diff settings (the latter is on by default). See the section called “git-config(1)”.

EXAMPLES

When a rebase required merge conflicts to be resolved, compare the changes introduced by the rebase directly afterwards using:

$ git range-diff @{u} @{1} @

A typical output of git range-diff would look like this:

-:  ------- > 1:  0ddba11 Prepare for the inevitable!
1:  c0debee = 2:  cab005e Add a helpful message at the start
2:  f00dbal ! 3:  decafe1 Describe a bug
    @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
     Author: A U Thor <author@example.com>

    -TODO: Describe a bug
    +Describe a bug
    @@ -324,5 +324,6
      This is expected.

    -+What is unexpected is that it will also crash.
    ++Unexpectedly, it also crashes. This is a bug, and the jury is
    ++still out there how to fix it best. See ticket #314 for details.

      Contact
3:  bedead < -:  ------- TO-UNDO

In this example, there are 3 old and 3 new commits, where the developer removed the 3rd, added a new one before the first two, and modified the commit message of the 2nd commit as well as its diff.

When the output goes to a terminal, it is color-coded by default, just like regular git diff's output. In addition, the first line (adding a commit) is green, the last line (deleting a commit) is red, the second line (with a perfect match) is yellow like the commit header of git show's output, and the third line colors the old commit red, the new one green and the rest like git show's commit header.

A naive color-coded diff of diffs is actually a bit hard to read, though, as it colors the entire lines red or green. The line that added "What is unexpected" in the old commit, for example, is completely red, even if the intent of the old commit was to add something.

To help with that, range uses the --dual-color mode by default. In this mode, the diff of diffs will retain the original diff colors, and prefix the lines with -/+ markers that have their background red or green, to make it more obvious that they describe how the diff itself changed.

Algorithm

The general idea is this: we generate a cost matrix between the commits in both commit ranges, then solve the least-cost assignment.

The cost matrix is populated thusly: for each pair of commits, both diffs are generated and the "diff of diffs" is generated, with 3 context lines, then the number of lines in that diff is used as cost.

To avoid false positives (e.g. when a patch has been removed, and an unrelated patch has been added between two iterations of the same patch series), the cost matrix is extended to allow for that, by adding fixed-cost entries for wholesale deletes/adds.

Example: Let commits 1--2 be the first iteration of a patch series and A--C the second iteration. Let's assume that A is a cherry-pick of 2, and C is a cherry-pick of 1 but with a small modification (say, a fixed typo). Visualize the commits as a bipartite graph:

    1            A

    2            B

                 C

We are looking for a "best" explanation of the new series in terms of the old one. We can represent an "explanation" as an edge in the graph:

    1            A
               /
    2 --------'  B

                 C

This explanation comes for "free" because there was no change. Similarly C could be explained using 1, but that comes at some cost c>0 because of the modification:

    1 ----.      A
          |    /
    2 ----+---'  B
          |
          `----- C
          c>0

In mathematical terms, what we are looking for is some sort of a minimum cost bipartite matching; 1` is matched to C at some cost, etc. The underlying graph is in fact a complete bipartite graph; the cost we associate with every edge is the size of the diff between the two commits patches. To explain also new commits, we introduce dummy nodes on both sides:

    1 ----.      A
          |    /
    2 ----+---'  B
          |
    o     `----- C
          c>0
    o            o

    o            o

The cost of an edge o--C is the size of C's diff, modified by a fudge factor that should be smaller than 100%. The cost of an edge o--o is free. The fudge factor is necessary because even if 1 and C have nothing in common, they may still share a few empty lines and such, possibly making the assignment 1--C, o--o slightly cheaper than 1--o, o--C even if 1 and C have nothing in common. With the fudge factor we require a much larger common part to consider patches as corresponding.

The overall time needed to compute this algorithm is the time needed to compute n+m commit diffs and then n*m diffs of patches, plus the time needed to compute the least-cost assignment between n and m diffs. Git uses an implementation of the Jonker-Volgenant algorithm to solve the assignment problem, which has cubic runtime complexity. The matching found in this case will look like this:

    1 ----.      A
          |    /
    2 ----+---'  B
       .--+-----'
    o -'  `----- C
          c>0
    o ---------- o

    o ---------- o

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-read-tree(1)

NAME

git-read-tree - Reads tree information into the index

SYNOPSIS

git read-tree [(-m [--trivial] [--aggressive] | --reset | --prefix=<prefix>)
                [-u | -i]] [--index-output=<file>] [--no-sparse-checkout]
                (--empty | <tree-ish1> [<tree-ish2> [<tree-ish3>]])

DESCRIPTION

Reads the tree information given by <tree-ish> into the index, but does not actually update any of the files it "caches". (see: the section called “git-checkout-index(1)”)

Optionally, it can merge a tree into the index, perform a fast-forward (i.e. 2-way) merge, or a 3-way merge, with the -m flag. When used with -m, the -u flag causes it to also update the files in the work tree with the result of the merge.

Only trivial merges are done by git read-tree itself. Only conflicting paths will be in an unmerged state when git read-tree returns.

OPTIONS

-m
Perform a merge, not just a read. The command will refuse to run if your index file has unmerged entries, indicating that you have not finished a previous merge you started.
--reset
Same as -m, except that unmerged entries are discarded instead of failing. When used with -u, updates leading to loss of working tree changes or untracked files or directories will not abort the operation.
-u
After a successful merge, update the files in the work tree with the result of the merge.
-i
Usually a merge requires the index file as well as the files in the working tree to be up to date with the current head commit, in order not to lose local changes. This flag disables the check with the working tree and is meant to be used when creating a merge of trees that are not directly related to the current working tree status into a temporary index file.
-n , --dry-run
Check if the command would error out, without updating the index or the files in the working tree for real.
-v
Show the progress of checking files out.
--trivial
Restrict three-way merge by git read-tree to happen only if there is no file-level merging required, instead of resolving merge for trivial cases and leaving conflicting files unresolved in the index.
--aggressive

Usually a three-way merge by git read-tree resolves the merge for really trivial cases and leaves other cases unresolved in the index, so that porcelains can implement different merge policies. This flag makes the command resolve a few more cases internally:

  • when one side removes a path and the other side leaves the path unmodified. The resolution is to remove that path.
  • when both sides remove a path. The resolution is to remove that path.
  • when both sides add a path identically. The resolution is to add that path.
--prefix=<prefix>
Keep the current index contents, and read the contents of the named tree-ish under the directory at <prefix>. The command will refuse to overwrite entries that already existed in the original index file.
--index-output=<file>
Instead of writing the results out to $GIT_INDEX_FILE, write the resulting index in the named file. While the command is operating, the original index file is locked with the same mechanism as usual. The file must allow to be rename(2)ed into from a temporary file that is created next to the usual index file; typically this means it needs to be on the same filesystem as the index file itself, and you need write permission to the directories the index file and index output file are located in.
--[no-]recurse-submodules
Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all active submodules according to the commit recorded in the superproject by calling read-tree recursively, also setting the submodules' HEAD to be detached at that commit.
--no-sparse-checkout
Disable sparse checkout support even if core.sparseCheckout is true.
--empty
Instead of reading tree object(s) into the index, just empty it.
-q , --quiet
Quiet, suppress feedback messages.
<tree-ish#>
The id of the tree object(s) to be read/merged.

MERGING

If -m is specified, git read-tree can perform 3 kinds of merge, a single tree merge if only 1 tree is given, a fast-forward merge with 2 trees, or a 3-way merge if 3 or more trees are provided.

Single Tree Merge

If only 1 tree is specified, git read-tree operates as if the user did not specify -m, except that if the original index has an entry for a given pathname, and the contents of the path match with the tree being read, the stat info from the index is used. (In other words, the index's stat()s take precedence over the merged tree's).

That means that if you do a git read-tree -m <newtree> followed by a git checkout-index -f -u -a, the git checkout-index only checks out the stuff that really changed.

This is used to avoid unnecessary false hits when git diff-files is run after git read-tree.

Two Tree Merge

Typically, this is invoked as git read-tree -m $H $M, where $H is the head commit of the current repository, and $M is the head of a foreign tree, which is simply ahead of $H (i.e. we are in a fast-forward situation).

When two trees are specified, the user is telling git read-tree the following:

  1. The current index and work tree is derived from $H, but the user may have local changes in them since $H.
  2. The user wants to fast-forward to $M.

In this case, the git read-tree -m $H $M command makes sure that no local change is lost as the result of this "merge". Here are the "carry forward" rules, where "I" denotes the index, "clean" means that index and work tree coincide, and "exists"/"nothing" refer to the presence of a path in the specified commit:

        I                   H        M        Result
       -------------------------------------------------------
     0  nothing             nothing  nothing  (does not happen)
     1  nothing             nothing  exists   use M
     2  nothing             exists   nothing  remove path from index
     3  nothing             exists   exists,  use M if "initial checkout",
                                     H == M   keep index otherwise
                                     exists,  fail
                                     H != M

        clean I==H  I==M
       ------------------
     4  yes   N/A   N/A     nothing  nothing  keep index
     5  no    N/A   N/A     nothing  nothing  keep index

     6  yes   N/A   yes     nothing  exists   keep index
     7  no    N/A   yes     nothing  exists   keep index
     8  yes   N/A   no      nothing  exists   fail
     9  no    N/A   no      nothing  exists   fail

     10 yes   yes   N/A     exists   nothing  remove path from index
     11 no    yes   N/A     exists   nothing  fail
     12 yes   no    N/A     exists   nothing  fail
     13 no    no    N/A     exists   nothing  fail

        clean (H==M)
       ------
     14 yes                 exists   exists   keep index
     15 no                  exists   exists   keep index

        clean I==H  I==M (H!=M)
       ------------------
     16 yes   no    no      exists   exists   fail
     17 no    no    no      exists   exists   fail
     18 yes   no    yes     exists   exists   keep index
     19 no    no    yes     exists   exists   keep index
     20 yes   yes   no      exists   exists   use M
     21 no    yes   no      exists   exists   fail

In all "keep index" cases, the index entry stays as in the original index file. If the entry is not up to date, git read-tree keeps the copy in the work tree intact when operating under the -u flag.

When this form of git read-tree returns successfully, you can see which of the "local changes" that you made were carried forward by running git diff-index --cached $M. Note that this does not necessarily match what git diff-index --cached $H would have produced before such a two tree merge. This is because of cases 18 and 19 -- if you already had the changes in $M (e.g. maybe you picked it up via e-mail in a patch form), git diff-index --cached $H would have told you about the change before this merge, but it would not show in git diff-index --cached $M output after the two-tree merge.

Case 3 is slightly tricky and needs explanation. The result from this rule logically should be to remove the path if the user staged the removal of the path and then switching to a new branch. That however will prevent the initial checkout from happening, so the rule is modified to use M (new tree) only when the content of the index is empty. Otherwise the removal of the path is kept as long as $H and $M are the same.

3-Way Merge

Each "index" entry has two bits worth of "stage" state. stage 0 is the normal one, and is the only one you'd see in any kind of normal use.

However, when you do git read-tree with three trees, the "stage" starts out at 1.

This means that you can do

$ git read-tree -m <tree1> <tree2> <tree3>

and you will end up with an index with all of the <tree1> entries in "stage1", all of the <tree2> entries in "stage2" and all of the <tree3> entries in "stage3". When performing a merge of another branch into the current branch, we use the common ancestor tree as <tree1>, the current branch head as <tree2>, and the other branch head as <tree3>.

Furthermore, git read-tree has special-case logic that says: if you see a file that matches in all respects in the following states, it "collapses" back to "stage0":

  • stage 2 and 3 are the same; take one or the other (it makes no difference - the same work has been done on our branch in stage 2 and their branch in stage 3)
  • stage 1 and stage 2 are the same and stage 3 is different; take stage 3 (our branch in stage 2 did not do anything since the ancestor in stage 1 while their branch in stage 3 worked on it)
  • stage 1 and stage 3 are the same and stage 2 is different take stage 2 (we did something while they did nothing)

The git write-tree command refuses to write a nonsensical tree, and it will complain about unmerged entries if it sees a single entry that is not stage 0.

OK, this all sounds like a collection of totally nonsensical rules, but it's actually exactly what you want in order to do a fast merge. The different stages represent the "result tree" (stage 0, aka "merged"), the original tree (stage 1, aka "orig"), and the two trees you are trying to merge (stage 2 and 3 respectively).

The order of stages 1, 2 and 3 (hence the order of three <tree-ish> command-line arguments) are significant when you start a 3-way merge with an index file that is already populated. Here is an outline of how the algorithm works:

  • if a file exists in identical format in all three trees, it will automatically collapse to "merged" state by git read-tree.
  • a file that has any difference what-so-ever in the three trees will stay as separate entries in the index. It's up to "porcelain policy" to determine how to remove the non-0 stages, and insert a merged version.
  • the index file saves and restores with all this information, so you can merge things incrementally, but as long as it has entries in stages 1/2/3 (i.e., "unmerged entries") you can't write the result. So now the merge algorithm ends up being really simple:

    • you walk the index in order, and ignore all entries of stage 0, since they've already been done.
    • if you find a "stage1", but no matching "stage2" or "stage3", you know it's been removed from both trees (it only existed in the original tree), and you remove that entry.
    • if you find a matching "stage2" and "stage3" tree, you remove one of them, and turn the other into a "stage0" entry. Remove any matching "stage1" entry if it exists too. .. all the normal trivial rules ..

You would normally use git merge-index with supplied git merge-one-file to do this last step. The script updates the files in the working tree as it merges each path and at the end of a successful merge.

When you start a 3-way merge with an index file that is already populated, it is assumed that it represents the state of the files in your work tree, and you can even have files with changes unrecorded in the index file. It is further assumed that this state is "derived" from the stage 2 tree. The 3-way merge refuses to run if it finds an entry in the original index file that does not match stage 2.

This is done to prevent you from losing your work-in-progress changes, and mixing your random changes in an unrelated merge commit. To illustrate, suppose you start from what has been committed last to your repository:

$ JC=`git rev-parse --verify "HEAD^0"`
$ git checkout-index -f -u -a $JC

You do random edits, without running git update-index. And then you notice that the tip of your "upstream" tree has advanced since you pulled from him:

$ git fetch git://.... linus
$ LT=`git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD`

Your work tree is still based on your HEAD ($JC), but you have some edits since. Three-way merge makes sure that you have not added or modified index entries since $JC, and if you haven't, then does the right thing. So with the following sequence:

$ git read-tree -m -u `git merge-base $JC $LT` $JC $LT
$ git merge-index git-merge-one-file -a
$ echo "Merge with Linus" | \
  git commit-tree `git write-tree` -p $JC -p $LT

what you would commit is a pure merge between $JC and $LT without your work-in-progress changes, and your work tree would be updated to the result of the merge.

However, if you have local changes in the working tree that would be overwritten by this merge, git read-tree will refuse to run to prevent your changes from being lost.

In other words, there is no need to worry about what exists only in the working tree. When you have local changes in a part of the project that is not involved in the merge, your changes do not interfere with the merge, and are kept intact. When they do interfere, the merge does not even start (git read-tree complains loudly and fails without modifying anything). In such a case, you can simply continue doing what you were in the middle of doing, and when your working tree is ready (i.e. you have finished your work-in-progress), attempt the merge again.

SPARSE CHECKOUT

Note: The skip-worktree capabilities in the section called “git-update-index(1)” and read-tree predated the introduction of the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)”. Users are encouraged to use the sparse-checkout command in preference to these plumbing commands for sparse-checkout/skip-worktree related needs. However, the information below might be useful to users trying to understand the pattern style used in non-cone mode of the sparse-checkout command.

"Sparse checkout" allows populating the working directory sparsely. It uses the skip-worktree bit (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”) to tell Git whether a file in the working directory is worth looking at.

git read-tree and other merge-based commands (git merge, git checkout…) can help maintaining the skip-worktree bitmap and working directory update. $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout is used to define the skip-worktree reference bitmap. When git read-tree needs to update the working directory, it resets the skip-worktree bit in the index based on this file, which uses the same syntax as .gitignore files. If an entry matches a pattern in this file, or the entry corresponds to a file present in the working tree, then skip-worktree will not be set on that entry. Otherwise, skip-worktree will be set.

Then it compares the new skip-worktree value with the previous one. If skip-worktree turns from set to unset, it will add the corresponding file back. If it turns from unset to set, that file will be removed.

While $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout is usually used to specify what files are in, you can also specify what files are not in, using negate patterns. For example, to remove the file unwanted:

/*
!unwanted

Another tricky thing is fully repopulating the working directory when you no longer want sparse checkout. You cannot just disable "sparse checkout" because skip-worktree bits are still in the index and your working directory is still sparsely populated. You should re-populate the working directory with the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file content as follows:

/*

Then you can disable sparse checkout. Sparse checkout support in git read-tree and similar commands is disabled by default. You need to turn core.sparseCheckout on in order to have sparse checkout support.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-rebase(1)

NAME

git-rebase - Reapply commits on top of another base tip

SYNOPSIS

git rebase [-i | --interactive] [<options>] [--exec <cmd>]
        [--onto <newbase> | --keep-base] [<upstream> [<branch>]]
git rebase [-i | --interactive] [<options>] [--exec <cmd>] [--onto <newbase>]
        --root [<branch>]
git rebase (--continue|--skip|--abort|--quit|--edit-todo|--show-current-patch)

DESCRIPTION

If <branch> is specified, git rebase will perform an automatic git switch <branch> before doing anything else. Otherwise it remains on the current branch.

If <upstream> is not specified, the upstream configured in branch.<name>.remote and branch.<name>.merge options will be used (see the section called “git-config(1)” for details) and the --fork-point option is assumed. If you are currently not on any branch or if the current branch does not have a configured upstream, the rebase will abort.

All changes made by commits in the current branch but that are not in <upstream> are saved to a temporary area. This is the same set of commits that would be shown by git log <upstream>..HEAD; or by git log 'fork_point'..HEAD, if --fork-point is active (see the description on --fork-point below); or by git log HEAD, if the --root option is specified.

The current branch is reset to <upstream> or <newbase> if the --onto option was supplied. This has the exact same effect as git reset --hard <upstream> (or <newbase>). ORIG_HEAD is set to point at the tip of the branch before the reset.

Note

ORIG_HEAD is not guaranteed to still point to the previous branch tip at the end of the rebase if other commands that write that pseudo-ref (e.g. git reset) are used during the rebase. The previous branch tip, however, is accessible using the reflog of the current branch (i.e. @{1}, see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”).

The commits that were previously saved into the temporary area are then reapplied to the current branch, one by one, in order. Note that any commits in HEAD which introduce the same textual changes as a commit in HEAD..<upstream> are omitted (i.e., a patch already accepted upstream with a different commit message or timestamp will be skipped).

It is possible that a merge failure will prevent this process from being completely automatic. You will have to resolve any such merge failure and run git rebase --continue. Another option is to bypass the commit that caused the merge failure with git rebase --skip. To check out the original <branch> and remove the .git/rebase-apply working files, use the command git rebase --abort instead.

Assume the following history exists and the current branch is "topic":

          A---B---C topic
         /
    D---E---F---G master

From this point, the result of either of the following commands:

git rebase master
git rebase master topic

would be:

                  A'--B'--C' topic
                 /
    D---E---F---G master

NOTE: The latter form is just a short-hand of git checkout topic followed by git rebase master. When rebase exits topic will remain the checked-out branch.

If the upstream branch already contains a change you have made (e.g., because you mailed a patch which was applied upstream), then that commit will be skipped and warnings will be issued (if the merge backend is used). For example, running git rebase master on the following history (in which A' and A introduce the same set of changes, but have different committer information):

          A---B---C topic
         /
    D---E---A'---F master

will result in:

                   B'---C' topic
                  /
    D---E---A'---F master

Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to another, to pretend that you forked the topic branch from the latter branch, using rebase --onto.

First let's assume your topic is based on branch next. For example, a feature developed in topic depends on some functionality which is found in next.

    o---o---o---o---o  master
         \
          o---o---o---o---o  next
                           \
                            o---o---o  topic

We want to make topic forked from branch master; for example, because the functionality on which topic depends was merged into the more stable master branch. We want our tree to look like this:

    o---o---o---o---o  master
        |            \
        |             o'--o'--o'  topic
         \
          o---o---o---o---o  next

We can get this using the following command:

git rebase --onto master next topic

Another example of --onto option is to rebase part of a branch. If we have the following situation:

                            H---I---J topicB
                           /
                  E---F---G  topicA
                 /
    A---B---C---D  master

then the command

git rebase --onto master topicA topicB

would result in:

                 H'--I'--J'  topicB
                /
                | E---F---G  topicA
                |/
    A---B---C---D  master

This is useful when topicB does not depend on topicA.

A range of commits could also be removed with rebase. If we have the following situation:

    E---F---G---H---I---J  topicA

then the command

git rebase --onto topicA~5 topicA~3 topicA

would result in the removal of commits F and G:

    E---H'---I'---J'  topicA

This is useful if F and G were flawed in some way, or should not be part of topicA. Note that the argument to --onto and the <upstream> parameter can be any valid commit-ish.

In case of conflict, git rebase will stop at the first problematic commit and leave conflict markers in the tree. You can use git diff to locate the markers (<<<<<<) and make edits to resolve the conflict. For each file you edit, you need to tell Git that the conflict has been resolved, typically this would be done with

git add <filename>

After resolving the conflict manually and updating the index with the desired resolution, you can continue the rebasing process with

git rebase --continue

Alternatively, you can undo the git rebase with

git rebase --abort

MODE OPTIONS

The options in this section cannot be used with any other option, including not with each other:

--continue
Restart the rebasing process after having resolved a merge conflict.
--skip
Restart the rebasing process by skipping the current patch.
--abort
Abort the rebase operation and reset HEAD to the original branch. If <branch> was provided when the rebase operation was started, then HEAD will be reset to <branch>. Otherwise HEAD will be reset to where it was when the rebase operation was started.
--quit
Abort the rebase operation but HEAD is not reset back to the original branch. The index and working tree are also left unchanged as a result. If a temporary stash entry was created using --autostash, it will be saved to the stash list.
--edit-todo
Edit the todo list during an interactive rebase.
--show-current-patch
Show the current patch in an interactive rebase or when rebase is stopped because of conflicts. This is the equivalent of git show REBASE_HEAD.

OPTIONS

--onto <newbase>

Starting point at which to create the new commits. If the --onto option is not specified, the starting point is <upstream>. May be any valid commit, and not just an existing branch name.

As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

--keep-base

Set the starting point at which to create the new commits to the merge base of <upstream> and <branch>. Running git rebase --keep-base <upstream> <branch> is equivalent to running git rebase --reapply-cherry-picks --no-fork-point --onto <upstream>...<branch> <upstream> <branch>.

This option is useful in the case where one is developing a feature on top of an upstream branch. While the feature is being worked on, the upstream branch may advance and it may not be the best idea to keep rebasing on top of the upstream but to keep the base commit as-is. As the base commit is unchanged this option implies --reapply-cherry-picks to avoid losing commits.

Although both this option and --fork-point find the merge base between <upstream> and <branch>, this option uses the merge base as the starting point on which new commits will be created, whereas --fork-point uses the merge base to determine the set of commits which will be rebased.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

<upstream>
Upstream branch to compare against. May be any valid commit, not just an existing branch name. Defaults to the configured upstream for the current branch.
<branch>
Working branch; defaults to HEAD.
--apply

Use applying strategies to rebase (calling git-am internally). This option may become a no-op in the future once the merge backend handles everything the apply one does.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--empty=(drop|keep|stop)

How to handle commits that are not empty to start and are not clean cherry-picks of any upstream commit, but which become empty after rebasing (because they contain a subset of already upstream changes):

drop
The commit will be dropped. This is the default behavior.
keep
The commit will be kept. This option is implied when --exec is specified unless -i/--interactive is also specified.
stop , ask
The rebase will halt when the commit is applied, allowing you to choose whether to drop it, edit files more, or just commit the empty changes. This option is implied when -i/--interactive is specified. ask is a deprecated synonym of stop.

Note that commits which start empty are kept (unless --no-keep-empty is specified), and commits which are clean cherry-picks (as determined by git log --cherry-mark ...) are detected and dropped as a preliminary step (unless --reapply-cherry-picks or --keep-base is passed).

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--no-keep-empty , --keep-empty

Do not keep commits that start empty before the rebase (i.e. that do not change anything from its parent) in the result. The default is to keep commits which start empty, since creating such commits requires passing the --allow-empty override flag to git commit, signifying that a user is very intentionally creating such a commit and thus wants to keep it.

Usage of this flag will probably be rare, since you can get rid of commits that start empty by just firing up an interactive rebase and removing the lines corresponding to the commits you don't want. This flag exists as a convenient shortcut, such as for cases where external tools generate many empty commits and you want them all removed.

For commits which do not start empty but become empty after rebasing, see the --empty flag.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--reapply-cherry-picks , --no-reapply-cherry-picks

Reapply all clean cherry-picks of any upstream commit instead of preemptively dropping them. (If these commits then become empty after rebasing, because they contain a subset of already upstream changes, the behavior towards them is controlled by the --empty flag.)

In the absence of --keep-base (or if --no-reapply-cherry-picks is given), these commits will be automatically dropped. Because this necessitates reading all upstream commits, this can be expensive in repositories with a large number of upstream commits that need to be read. When using the merge backend, warnings will be issued for each dropped commit (unless --quiet is given). Advice will also be issued unless advice.skippedCherryPicks is set to false (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--reapply-cherry-picks allows rebase to forgo reading all upstream commits, potentially improving performance.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--allow-empty-message

No-op. Rebasing commits with an empty message used to fail and this option would override that behavior, allowing commits with empty messages to be rebased. Now commits with an empty message do not cause rebasing to halt.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-m , --merge

Using merging strategies to rebase (default).

Note that a rebase merge works by replaying each commit from the working branch on top of the <upstream> branch. Because of this, when a merge conflict happens, the side reported as ours is the so-far rebased series, starting with <upstream>, and theirs is the working branch. In other words, the sides are swapped.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-s <strategy> , --strategy=<strategy>

Use the given merge strategy, instead of the default ort. This implies --merge.

Because git rebase replays each commit from the working branch on top of the <upstream> branch using the given strategy, using the ours strategy simply empties all patches from the <branch>, which makes little sense.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-X <strategy-option> , --strategy-option=<strategy-option>

Pass the <strategy-option> through to the merge strategy. This implies --merge and, if no strategy has been specified, -s ort. Note the reversal of ours and theirs as noted above for the -m option.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--rerere-autoupdate , --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to also update the index with the result of resolution. --no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what rerere did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the result to the index with a separate git add.
-S[<keyid>] , --gpg-sign[=<keyid>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
-q , --quiet
Be quiet. Implies --no-stat.
-v , --verbose
Be verbose. Implies --stat.
--stat
Show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. The diffstat is also controlled by the configuration option rebase.stat.
-n , --no-stat
Do not show a diffstat as part of the rebase process.
--no-verify
This option bypasses the pre-rebase hook. See also the section called “githooks(5)”.
--verify
Allows the pre-rebase hook to run, which is the default. This option can be used to override --no-verify. See also the section called “githooks(5)”.
-C<n>

Ensure at least <n> lines of surrounding context match before and after each change. When fewer lines of surrounding context exist they all must match. By default no context is ever ignored. Implies --apply.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--no-ff , --force-rebase , -f

Individually replay all rebased commits instead of fast-forwarding over the unchanged ones. This ensures that the entire history of the rebased branch is composed of new commits.

You may find this helpful after reverting a topic branch merge, as this option recreates the topic branch with fresh commits so it can be remerged successfully without needing to "revert the reversion" (see the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To for details).

--fork-point , --no-fork-point

Use reflog to find a better common ancestor between <upstream> and <branch> when calculating which commits have been introduced by <branch>.

When --fork-point is active, fork_point will be used instead of <upstream> to calculate the set of commits to rebase, where fork_point is the result of git merge-base --fork-point <upstream> <branch> command (see the section called “git-merge-base(1)”). If fork_point ends up being empty, the <upstream> will be used as a fallback.

If <upstream> or --keep-base is given on the command line, then the default is --no-fork-point, otherwise the default is --fork-point. See also rebase.forkpoint in the section called “git-config(1)”.

If your branch was based on <upstream> but <upstream> was rewound and your branch contains commits which were dropped, this option can be used with --keep-base in order to drop those commits from your branch.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--ignore-whitespace

Ignore whitespace differences when trying to reconcile differences. Currently, each backend implements an approximation of this behavior:

apply backend
When applying a patch, ignore changes in whitespace in context lines. Unfortunately, this means that if the "old" lines being replaced by the patch differ only in whitespace from the existing file, you will get a merge conflict instead of a successful patch application.
merge backend
Treat lines with only whitespace changes as unchanged when merging. Unfortunately, this means that any patch hunks that were intended to modify whitespace and nothing else will be dropped, even if the other side had no changes that conflicted.
--whitespace=<option>

This flag is passed to the git apply program (see the section called “git-apply(1)”) that applies the patch. Implies --apply.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--committer-date-is-author-date
Instead of using the current time as the committer date, use the author date of the commit being rebased as the committer date. This option implies --force-rebase.
--ignore-date , --reset-author-date

Instead of using the author date of the original commit, use the current time as the author date of the rebased commit. This option implies --force-rebase.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--signoff

Add a Signed-off-by trailer to all the rebased commits. Note that if --interactive is given then only commits marked to be picked, edited or reworded will have the trailer added.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-i , --interactive

Make a list of the commits which are about to be rebased. Let the user edit that list before rebasing. This mode can also be used to split commits (see SPLITTING COMMITS below).

The commit list format can be changed by setting the configuration option rebase.instructionFormat. A customized instruction format will automatically have the commit hash prepended to the format.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-r , --rebase-merges[=(rebase-cousins|no-rebase-cousins)] , --no-rebase-merges

By default, a rebase will simply drop merge commits from the todo list, and put the rebased commits into a single, linear branch. With --rebase-merges, the rebase will instead try to preserve the branching structure within the commits that are to be rebased, by recreating the merge commits. Any resolved merge conflicts or manual amendments in these merge commits will have to be resolved/re-applied manually. --no-rebase-merges can be used to countermand both the rebase.rebaseMerges config option and a previous --rebase-merges.

When rebasing merges, there are two modes: rebase-cousins and no-rebase-cousins. If the mode is not specified, it defaults to no-rebase-cousins. In no-rebase-cousins mode, commits which do not have <upstream> as direct ancestor will keep their original branch point, i.e. commits that would be excluded by the section called “git-log(1)”'s --ancestry-path option will keep their original ancestry by default. In rebase-cousins mode, such commits are instead rebased onto <upstream> (or <onto>, if specified).

It is currently only possible to recreate the merge commits using the ort merge strategy; different merge strategies can be used only via explicit exec git merge -s <strategy> [...] commands.

See also REBASING MERGES and INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

-x <cmd> , --exec <cmd>

Append "exec <cmd>" after each line creating a commit in the final history. <cmd> will be interpreted as one or more shell commands. Any command that fails will interrupt the rebase, with exit code 1.

You may execute several commands by either using one instance of --exec with several commands:

git rebase -i --exec "cmd1 && cmd2 && ..."

or by giving more than one --exec:

git rebase -i --exec "cmd1" --exec "cmd2" --exec ...

If --autosquash is used, exec lines will not be appended for the intermediate commits, and will only appear at the end of each squash/fixup series.

This uses the --interactive machinery internally, but it can be run without an explicit --interactive.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--root

Rebase all commits reachable from <branch>, instead of limiting them with an <upstream>. This allows you to rebase the root commit(s) on a branch.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--autosquash , --no-autosquash

Automatically squash commits with specially formatted messages into previous commits being rebased. If a commit message starts with "squash! ", "fixup! " or "amend! ", the remainder of the title is taken as a commit specifier, which matches a previous commit if it matches the title or the hash of that commit. If no commit matches fully, matches of the specifier with the start of commit titles are considered.

In the rebase todo list, the actions of squash, fixup and amend commits are changed from pick to squash, fixup or fixup -C, respectively, and they are moved right after the commit they modify. The --interactive option can be used to review and edit the todo list before proceeding.

The recommended way to create commits with squash markers is by using the --squash, --fixup, --fixup=amend: or --fixup=reword: options of the section called “git-commit(1)”, which take the target commit as an argument and automatically fill in the title of the new commit from that.

Setting configuration variable rebase.autoSquash to true enables auto-squashing by default for interactive rebase. The --no-autosquash option can be used to override that setting.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

--autostash , --no-autostash
Automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts.
--reschedule-failed-exec , --no-reschedule-failed-exec

Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive mode (or when an --exec option was provided).

This option applies once a rebase is started. It is preserved for the whole rebase based on, in order, the command line option provided to the initial git rebase, the rebase.rescheduleFailedExec configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)” or "CONFIGURATION" below), or it defaults to false.

Recording this option for the whole rebase is a convenience feature. Otherwise an explicit --no-reschedule-failed-exec at the start would be overridden by the presence of a rebase.rescheduleFailedExec=true configuration when git rebase --continue is invoked. Currently, you cannot pass --[no-]reschedule-failed-exec to git rebase --continue.

--update-refs , --no-update-refs

Automatically force-update any branches that point to commits that are being rebased. Any branches that are checked out in a worktree are not updated in this way.

If the configuration variable rebase.updateRefs is set, then this option can be used to override and disable this setting.

See also INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS below.

INCOMPATIBLE OPTIONS

The following options:

  • --apply
  • --whitespace
  • -C

are incompatible with the following options:

  • --merge
  • --strategy
  • --strategy-option
  • --autosquash
  • --rebase-merges
  • --interactive
  • --exec
  • --no-keep-empty
  • --empty=
  • --[no-]reapply-cherry-picks when used without --keep-base
  • --update-refs
  • --root when used without --onto

In addition, the following pairs of options are incompatible:

  • --keep-base and --onto
  • --keep-base and --root
  • --fork-point and --root

BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES

git rebase has two primary backends: apply and merge. (The apply backend used to be known as the am backend, but the name led to confusion as it looks like a verb instead of a noun. Also, the merge backend used to be known as the interactive backend, but it is now used for non-interactive cases as well. Both were renamed based on lower-level functionality that underpinned each.) There are some subtle differences in how these two backends behave:

Empty commits

The apply backend unfortunately drops intentionally empty commits, i.e. commits that started empty, though these are rare in practice. It also drops commits that become empty and has no option for controlling this behavior.

The merge backend keeps intentionally empty commits by default (though with -i they are marked as empty in the todo list editor, or they can be dropped automatically with --no-keep-empty).

Similar to the apply backend, by default the merge backend drops commits that become empty unless -i/--interactive is specified (in which case it stops and asks the user what to do). The merge backend also has an --empty=(drop|keep|stop) option for changing the behavior of handling commits that become empty.

Directory rename detection

Due to the lack of accurate tree information (arising from constructing fake ancestors with the limited information available in patches), directory rename detection is disabled in the apply backend. Disabled directory rename detection means that if one side of history renames a directory and the other adds new files to the old directory, then the new files will be left behind in the old directory without any warning at the time of rebasing that you may want to move these files into the new directory.

Directory rename detection works with the merge backend to provide you warnings in such cases.

Context

The apply backend works by creating a sequence of patches (by calling format-patch internally), and then applying the patches in sequence (calling am internally). Patches are composed of multiple hunks, each with line numbers, a context region, and the actual changes. The line numbers have to be taken with some offset, since the other side will likely have inserted or deleted lines earlier in the file. The context region is meant to help find how to adjust the line numbers in order to apply the changes to the right lines. However, if multiple areas of the code have the same surrounding lines of context, the wrong one can be picked. There are real-world cases where this has caused commits to be reapplied incorrectly with no conflicts reported. Setting diff.context to a larger value may prevent such types of problems, but increases the chance of spurious conflicts (since it will require more lines of matching context to apply).

The merge backend works with a full copy of each relevant file, insulating it from these types of problems.

Labelling of conflicts markers

When there are content conflicts, the merge machinery tries to annotate each side's conflict markers with the commits where the content came from. Since the apply backend drops the original information about the rebased commits and their parents (and instead generates new fake commits based off limited information in the generated patches), those commits cannot be identified; instead it has to fall back to a commit summary. Also, when merge.conflictStyle is set to diff3 or zdiff3, the apply backend will use "constructed merge base" to label the content from the merge base, and thus provide no information about the merge base commit whatsoever.

The merge backend works with the full commits on both sides of history and thus has no such limitations.

Hooks

The apply backend has not traditionally called the post-commit hook, while the merge backend has. Both have called the post-checkout hook, though the merge backend has squelched its output. Further, both backends only call the post-checkout hook with the starting point commit of the rebase, not the intermediate commits nor the final commit. In each case, the calling of these hooks was by accident of implementation rather than by design (both backends were originally implemented as shell scripts and happened to invoke other commands like git checkout or git commit that would call the hooks). Both backends should have the same behavior, though it is not entirely clear which, if any, is correct. We will likely make rebase stop calling either of these hooks in the future.

Interruptability

The apply backend has safety problems with an ill-timed interrupt; if the user presses Ctrl-C at the wrong time to try to abort the rebase, the rebase can enter a state where it cannot be aborted with a subsequent git rebase --abort. The merge backend does not appear to suffer from the same shortcoming. (See https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200207132152.GC2868@szeder.dev/ for details.)

Commit Rewording

When a conflict occurs while rebasing, rebase stops and asks the user to resolve. Since the user may need to make notable changes while resolving conflicts, after conflicts are resolved and the user has run git rebase --continue, the rebase should open an editor and ask the user to update the commit message. The merge backend does this, while the apply backend blindly applies the original commit message.

Miscellaneous differences

There are a few more behavioral differences that most folks would probably consider inconsequential but which are mentioned for completeness:

  • Reflog: The two backends will use different wording when describing the changes made in the reflog, though both will make use of the word "rebase".
  • Progress, informational, and error messages: The two backends provide slightly different progress and informational messages. Also, the apply backend writes error messages (such as "Your files would be overwritten…") to stdout, while the merge backend writes them to stderr.
  • State directories: The two backends keep their state in different directories under .git/

MERGE STRATEGIES

The merge mechanism (git merge and git pull commands) allows the backend merge strategies to be chosen with -s option. Some strategies can also take their own options, which can be passed by giving -X<option> arguments to git merge and/or git pull.

ort

This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging one branch. This strategy can only resolve two heads using a 3-way merge algorithm. When there is more than one common ancestor that can be used for 3-way merge, it creates a merged tree of the common ancestors and uses that as the reference tree for the 3-way merge. This has been reported to result in fewer merge conflicts without causing mismerges by tests done on actual merge commits taken from Linux 2.6 kernel development history. Additionally this strategy can detect and handle merges involving renames. It does not make use of detected copies. The name for this algorithm is an acronym ("Ostensibly Recursive's Twin") and came from the fact that it was written as a replacement for the previous default algorithm, recursive.

In the case where the path is a submodule, if the submodule commit used on one side of the merge is a descendant of the submodule commit used on the other side of the merge, Git attempts to fast-forward to the descendant. Otherwise, Git will treat this case as a conflict, suggesting as a resolution a submodule commit that is descendant of the conflicting ones, if one exists.

The ort strategy can take the following options:

ours

This option forces conflicting hunks to be auto-resolved cleanly by favoring our version. Changes from the other tree that do not conflict with our side are reflected in the merge result. For a binary file, the entire contents are taken from our side.

This should not be confused with the ours merge strategy, which does not even look at what the other tree contains at all. It discards everything the other tree did, declaring our history contains all that happened in it.

theirs
This is the opposite of ours; note that, unlike ours, there is no theirs merge strategy to confuse this merge option with.
ignore-space-change , ignore-all-space , ignore-space-at-eol , ignore-cr-at-eol

Treats lines with the indicated type of whitespace change as unchanged for the sake of a three-way merge. Whitespace changes mixed with other changes to a line are not ignored. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” -b, -w, --ignore-space-at-eol, and --ignore-cr-at-eol.

  • If their version only introduces whitespace changes to a line, our version is used;
  • If our version introduces whitespace changes but their version includes a substantial change, their version is used;
  • Otherwise, the merge proceeds in the usual way.
renormalize
This runs a virtual check-out and check-in of all three stages of any file which needs a three-way merge. This option is meant to be used when merging branches with different clean filters or end-of-line normalization rules. See "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details.
no-renormalize
Disables the renormalize option. This overrides the merge.renormalize configuration variable.
find-renames[=<n>]
Turn on rename detection, optionally setting the similarity threshold. This is the default. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --find-renames.
rename-threshold=<n>
Deprecated synonym for find-renames=<n>.
no-renames
Turn off rename detection. This overrides the merge.renames configuration variable. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --no-renames.
histogram
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=histogram.
patience
Deprecated synonym for diff-algorithm=patience.
diff-algorithm=(histogram|minimal|myers|patience)
Use a different diff algorithm while merging, which can help avoid mismerges that occur due to unimportant matching lines (such as braces from distinct functions). See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --diff-algorithm. Note that ort defaults to diff-algorithm=histogram, while regular diffs currently default to the diff.algorithm config setting.
subtree[=<path>]
This option is a more advanced form of subtree strategy, where the strategy makes a guess on how two trees must be shifted to match with each other when merging. Instead, the specified path is prefixed (or stripped from the beginning) to make the shape of two trees to match.
recursive
This is now a synonym for ort. It was an alternative implementation until v2.49.0, but was redirected to mean ort in v2.50.0. The previous recursive strategy was the default strategy for resolving two heads from Git v0.99.9k until v2.33.0.
resolve
This can only resolve two heads (i.e. the current branch and another branch you pulled from) using a 3-way merge algorithm. It tries to carefully detect criss-cross merge ambiguities. It does not handle renames.
octopus
This resolves cases with more than two heads, but refuses to do a complex merge that needs manual resolution. It is primarily meant to be used for bundling topic branch heads together. This is the default merge strategy when pulling or merging more than one branch.
ours
This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note that this is different from the -Xours option to the ort merge strategy.
subtree
This is a modified ort strategy. When merging trees A and B, if B corresponds to a subtree of A, B is first adjusted to match the tree structure of A, instead of reading the trees at the same level. This adjustment is also done to the common ancestor tree.

With the strategies that use 3-way merge (including the default, ort), if a change is made on both branches, but later reverted on one of the branches, that change will be present in the merged result; some people find this behavior confusing. It occurs because only the heads and the merge base are considered when performing a merge, not the individual commits. The merge algorithm therefore considers the reverted change as no change at all, and substitutes the changed version instead.

NOTES

You should understand the implications of using git rebase on a repository that you share. See also RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE below.

When the rebase is run, it will first execute a pre-rebase hook if one exists. You can use this hook to do sanity checks and reject the rebase if it isn't appropriate. Please see the template pre-rebase hook script for an example.

Upon completion, <branch> will be the current branch.

INTERACTIVE MODE

Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits which are rebased. You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted patches).

The interactive mode is meant for this type of workflow:

  1. have a wonderful idea
  2. hack on the code
  3. prepare a series for submission
  4. submit

where point 2. consists of several instances of

a) regular use

  1. finish something worthy of a commit
  2. commit

b) independent fixup

  1. realize that something does not work
  2. fix that
  3. commit it

Sometimes the thing fixed in b.2. cannot be amended to the not-quite perfect commit it fixes, because that commit is buried deeply in a patch series. That is exactly what interactive rebase is for: use it after plenty of "a"s and "b"s, by rearranging and editing commits, and squashing multiple commits into one.

Start it with the last commit you want to retain as-is:

git rebase -i <after-this-commit>

An editor will be fired up with all the commits in your current branch (ignoring merge commits), which come after the given commit. You can reorder the commits in this list to your heart's content, and you can remove them. The list looks more or less like this:

pick deadbee The oneline of this commit
pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
...

The oneline descriptions are purely for your pleasure; git rebase will not look at them but at the commit names ("deadbee" and "fa1afe1" in this example), so do not delete or edit the names.

By replacing the command "pick" with the command "edit", you can tell git rebase to stop after applying that commit, so that you can edit the files and/or the commit message, amend the commit, and continue rebasing.

To interrupt the rebase (just like an "edit" command would do, but without cherry-picking any commit first), use the "break" command.

If you just want to edit the commit message for a commit, replace the command "pick" with the command "reword".

To drop a commit, replace the command "pick" with "drop", or just delete the matching line.

If you want to fold two or more commits into one, replace the command "pick" for the second and subsequent commits with "squash" or "fixup". If the commits had different authors, the folded commit will be attributed to the author of the first commit. The suggested commit message for the folded commit is the concatenation of the first commit's message with those identified by "squash" commands, omitting the messages of commits identified by "fixup" commands, unless "fixup -c" is used. In that case the suggested commit message is only the message of the "fixup -c" commit, and an editor is opened allowing you to edit the message. The contents (patch) of the "fixup -c" commit are still incorporated into the folded commit. If there is more than one "fixup -c" commit, the message from the final one is used. You can also use "fixup -C" to get the same behavior as "fixup -c" except without opening an editor.

git rebase will stop when "pick" has been replaced with "edit" or when a command fails due to merge errors. When you are done editing and/or resolving conflicts you can continue with git rebase --continue.

For example, if you want to reorder the last 5 commits, such that what was HEAD~4 becomes the new HEAD. To achieve that, you would call git rebase like this:

$ git rebase -i HEAD~5

And move the first patch to the end of the list.

You might want to recreate merge commits, e.g. if you have a history like this:

           X
            \
         A---M---B
        /
---o---O---P---Q

Suppose you want to rebase the side branch starting at "A" to "Q". Make sure that the current HEAD is "B", and call

$ git rebase -i -r --onto Q O

Reordering and editing commits usually creates untested intermediate steps. You may want to check that your history editing did not break anything by running a test, or at least recompiling at intermediate points in history by using the "exec" command (shortcut "x"). You may do so by creating a todo list like this one:

pick deadbee Implement feature XXX
fixup f1a5c00 Fix to feature XXX
exec make
pick c0ffeee The oneline of the next commit
edit deadbab The oneline of the commit after
exec cd subdir; make test
...

The interactive rebase will stop when a command fails (i.e. exits with non-0 status) to give you an opportunity to fix the problem. You can continue with git rebase --continue.

The "exec" command launches the command in a shell (the default one, usually /bin/sh), so you can use shell features (like "cd", ">", ";" …). The command is run from the root of the working tree.

$ git rebase -i --exec "make test"

This command lets you check that intermediate commits are compilable. The todo list becomes like that:

pick 5928aea one
exec make test
pick 04d0fda two
exec make test
pick ba46169 three
exec make test
pick f4593f9 four
exec make test

SPLITTING COMMITS

In interactive mode, you can mark commits with the action "edit". However, this does not necessarily mean that git rebase expects the result of this edit to be exactly one commit. Indeed, you can undo the commit, or you can add other commits. This can be used to split a commit into two:

  • Start an interactive rebase with git rebase -i <commit>^, where <commit> is the commit you want to split. In fact, any commit range will do, as long as it contains that commit.
  • Mark the commit you want to split with the action "edit".
  • When it comes to editing that commit, execute git reset HEAD^. The effect is that the HEAD is rewound by one, and the index follows suit. However, the working tree stays the same.
  • Now add the changes to the index that you want to have in the first commit. You can use git add (possibly interactively) or git gui (or both) to do that.
  • Commit the now-current index with whatever commit message is appropriate now.
  • Repeat the last two steps until your working tree is clean.
  • Continue the rebase with git rebase --continue.

If you are not absolutely sure that the intermediate revisions are consistent (they compile, pass the testsuite, etc.) you should use git stash to stash away the not-yet-committed changes after each commit, test, and amend the commit if fixes are necessary.

RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE

Rebasing (or any other form of rewriting) a branch that others have based work on is a bad idea: anyone downstream of it is forced to manually fix their history. This section explains how to do the fix from the downstream's point of view. The real fix, however, would be to avoid rebasing the upstream in the first place.

To illustrate, suppose you are in a situation where someone develops a subsystem branch, and you are working on a topic that is dependent on this subsystem. You might end up with a history like the following:

    o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
         \
          o---o---o---o---o  subsystem
                           \
                            *---*---*  topic

If subsystem is rebased against master, the following happens:

    o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
         \                       \
          o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                           \
                            *---*---*  topic

If you now continue development as usual, and eventually merge topic to subsystem, the commits from subsystem will remain duplicated forever:

    o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
         \                       \
          o---o---o---o---o       o'--o'--o'--o'--o'--M  subsystem
                           \                         /
                            *---*---*-..........-*--*  topic

Such duplicates are generally frowned upon because they clutter up history, making it harder to follow. To clean things up, you need to transplant the commits on topic to the new subsystem tip, i.e., rebase topic. This becomes a ripple effect: anyone downstream from topic is forced to rebase too, and so on!

There are two kinds of fixes, discussed in the following subsections:

Easy case: The changes are literally the same.
This happens if the subsystem rebase was a simple rebase and had no conflicts.
Hard case: The changes are not the same.
This happens if the subsystem rebase had conflicts, or used --interactive to omit, edit, squash, or fixup commits; or if the upstream used one of commit --amend, reset, or a full history rewriting command like filter-repo.

The easy case

Only works if the changes (patch IDs based on the diff contents) on subsystem are literally the same before and after the rebase subsystem did.

In that case, the fix is easy because git rebase knows to skip changes that are already present in the new upstream (unless --reapply-cherry-picks is given). So if you say (assuming you're on topic)

    $ git rebase subsystem

you will end up with the fixed history

    o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o  master
                                 \
                                  o'--o'--o'--o'--o'  subsystem
                                                   \
                                                    *---*---*  topic

The hard case

Things get more complicated if the subsystem changes do not exactly correspond to the ones before the rebase.

Note

While an "easy case recovery" sometimes appears to be successful even in the hard case, it may have unintended consequences. For example, a commit that was removed via git rebase --interactive will be resurrected!

The idea is to manually tell git rebase "where the old subsystem ended and your topic began", that is, what the old merge base between them was. You will have to find a way to name the last commit of the old subsystem, for example:

  • With the subsystem reflog: after git fetch, the old tip of subsystem is at subsystem@{1}. Subsequent fetches will increase the number. (See the section called “git-reflog(1)”.)
  • Relative to the tip of topic: knowing that your topic has three commits, the old tip of subsystem must be topic~3.

You can then transplant the old subsystem..topic to the new tip by saying (for the reflog case, and assuming you are on topic already):

    $ git rebase --onto subsystem subsystem@{1}

The ripple effect of a "hard case" recovery is especially bad: everyone downstream from topic will now have to perform a "hard case" recovery too!

REBASING MERGES

The interactive rebase command was originally designed to handle individual patch series. As such, it makes sense to exclude merge commits from the todo list, as the developer may have merged the then-current master while working on the branch, only to rebase all the commits onto master eventually (skipping the merge commits).

However, there are legitimate reasons why a developer may want to recreate merge commits: to keep the branch structure (or "commit topology") when working on multiple, inter-related branches.

In the following example, the developer works on a topic branch that refactors the way buttons are defined, and on another topic branch that uses that refactoring to implement a "Report a bug" button. The output of git log --graph --format=%s -5 may look like this:

*   Merge branch 'report-a-bug'
|\
| * Add the feedback button
* | Merge branch 'refactor-button'
|\ \
| |/
| * Use the Button class for all buttons
| * Extract a generic Button class from the DownloadButton one

The developer might want to rebase those commits to a newer master while keeping the branch topology, for example when the first topic branch is expected to be integrated into master much earlier than the second one, say, to resolve merge conflicts with changes to the DownloadButton class that made it into master.

This rebase can be performed using the --rebase-merges option. It will generate a todo list looking like this:

label onto

# Branch: refactor-button
reset onto
pick 123456 Extract a generic Button class from the DownloadButton one
pick 654321 Use the Button class for all buttons
label refactor-button

# Branch: report-a-bug
reset refactor-button # Use the Button class for all buttons
pick abcdef Add the feedback button
label report-a-bug

reset onto
merge -C a1b2c3 refactor-button # Merge 'refactor-button'
merge -C 6f5e4d report-a-bug # Merge 'report-a-bug'

In contrast to a regular interactive rebase, there are label, reset and merge commands in addition to pick ones.

The label command associates a label with the current HEAD when that command is executed. These labels are created as worktree-local refs (refs/rewritten/<label>) that will be deleted when the rebase finishes. That way, rebase operations in multiple worktrees linked to the same repository do not interfere with one another. If the label command fails, it is rescheduled immediately, with a helpful message how to proceed.

The reset command resets the HEAD, index and worktree to the specified revision. It is similar to an exec git reset --hard <label>, but refuses to overwrite untracked files. If the reset command fails, it is rescheduled immediately, with a helpful message how to edit the todo list (this typically happens when a reset command was inserted into the todo list manually and contains a typo).

The merge command will merge the specified revision(s) into whatever is HEAD at that time. With -C <original-commit>, the commit message of the specified merge commit will be used. When the -C is changed to a lower-case -c, the message will be opened in an editor after a successful merge so that the user can edit the message.

If a merge command fails for any reason other than merge conflicts (i.e. when the merge operation did not even start), it is rescheduled immediately.

By default, the merge command will use the ort merge strategy for regular merges, and octopus for octopus merges. One can specify a default strategy for all merges using the --strategy argument when invoking rebase, or can override specific merges in the interactive list of commands by using an exec command to call git merge explicitly with a --strategy argument. Note that when calling git merge explicitly like this, you can make use of the fact that the labels are worktree-local refs (the ref refs/rewritten/onto would correspond to the label onto, for example) in order to refer to the branches you want to merge.

Note: the first command (label onto) labels the revision onto which the commits are rebased; The name onto is just a convention, as a nod to the --onto option.

It is also possible to introduce completely new merge commits from scratch by adding a command of the form merge <merge-head>. This form will generate a tentative commit message and always open an editor to let the user edit it. This can be useful e.g. when a topic branch turns out to address more than a single concern and wants to be split into two or even more topic branches. Consider this todo list:

pick 192837 Switch from GNU Makefiles to CMake
pick 5a6c7e Document the switch to CMake
pick 918273 Fix detection of OpenSSL in CMake
pick afbecd http: add support for TLS v1.3
pick fdbaec Fix detection of cURL in CMake on Windows

The one commit in this list that is not related to CMake may very well have been motivated by working on fixing all those bugs introduced by switching to CMake, but it addresses a different concern. To split this branch into two topic branches, the todo list could be edited like this:

label onto

pick afbecd http: add support for TLS v1.3
label tlsv1.3

reset onto
pick 192837 Switch from GNU Makefiles to CMake
pick 918273 Fix detection of OpenSSL in CMake
pick fdbaec Fix detection of cURL in CMake on Windows
pick 5a6c7e Document the switch to CMake
label cmake

reset onto
merge tlsv1.3
merge cmake

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

rebase.backend
Default backend to use for rebasing. Possible choices are apply or merge. In the future, if the merge backend gains all remaining capabilities of the apply backend, this setting may become unused.
rebase.stat
Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. False by default.
rebase.autoSquash
If set to true, enable the --autosquash option of the section called “git-rebase(1)” by default for interactive mode. This can be overridden with the --no-autosquash option.
rebase.autoStash
When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts. This option can be overridden by the --no-autostash and --autostash options of the section called “git-rebase(1)”. Defaults to false.
rebase.updateRefs
If set to true enable --update-refs option by default.
rebase.missingCommitsCheck
If set to "warn", git rebase -i will print a warning if some commits are removed (e.g. a line was deleted), however the rebase will still proceed. If set to "error", it will print the previous warning and stop the rebase, git rebase --edit-todo can then be used to correct the error. If set to "ignore", no checking is done. To drop a commit without warning or error, use the drop command in the todo list. Defaults to "ignore".
rebase.instructionFormat
A format string, as specified in the section called “git-log(1)”, to be used for the todo list during an interactive rebase. The format will automatically have the commit hash prepended to the format.
rebase.abbreviateCommands

If set to true, git rebase will use abbreviated command names in the todo list resulting in something like this:

        p deadbee The oneline of the commit
        p fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
        ...

instead of:

        pick deadbee The oneline of the commit
        pick fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit
        ...

Defaults to false.

rebase.rescheduleFailedExec
Automatically reschedule exec commands that failed. This only makes sense in interactive mode (or when an --exec option was provided). This is the same as specifying the --reschedule-failed-exec option.
rebase.forkPoint
If set to false set --no-fork-point option by default.
rebase.rebaseMerges
Whether and how to set the --rebase-merges option by default. Can be rebase-cousins, no-rebase-cousins, or a boolean. Setting to true or to no-rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=no-rebase-cousins, setting to rebase-cousins is equivalent to --rebase-merges=rebase-cousins, and setting to false is equivalent to --no-rebase-merges. Passing --rebase-merges on the command line, with or without an argument, overrides any rebase.rebaseMerges configuration.
rebase.maxLabelLength
When generating label names from commit subjects, truncate the names to this length. By default, the names are truncated to a little less than NAME_MAX (to allow e.g. .lock files to be written for the corresponding loose refs).
sequence.editor
Text editor used by git rebase -i for editing the rebase instruction file. The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. It can be overridden by the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable. When not configured, the default commit message editor is used instead.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-receive-pack(1)

NAME

git-receive-pack - Receive what is pushed into the repository

SYNOPSIS

git receive-pack <git-dir>

DESCRIPTION

Invoked by git send-pack and updates the repository with the information fed from the remote end.

This command is usually not invoked directly by the end user. The UI for the protocol is on the git send-pack side, and the program pair is meant to be used to push updates to a remote repository. For pull operations, see the section called “git-fetch-pack(1)”.

The command allows for the creation and fast-forwarding of sha1 refs (heads/tags) on the remote end (strictly speaking, it is the local end git-receive-pack runs, but to the user who is sitting at the send-pack end, it is updating the remote. Confused?)

There are other real-world examples of using update and post-update hooks found in the Documentation/howto directory.

git-receive-pack honours the receive.denyNonFastForwards config option, which tells it if updates to a ref should be denied if they are not fast-forwards.

A number of other receive.* config options are available to tweak its behavior, see the section called “git-config(1)”.

OPTIONS

<git-dir>
The repository to sync into.
--http-backend-info-refs
Used by the section called “git-http-backend(1)” to serve up $GIT_URL/info/refs?service=git-receive-pack requests. See --http-backend-info-refs in the section called “git-upload-pack(1)”.
--skip-connectivity-check
Bypasses the connectivity checks that validate the existence of all objects in the transitive closure of reachable objects. This option is intended for server operators that want to implement their own object connectivity validation outside of Git. This is useful in such cases where the server-side knows additional information about how Git is being used and thus can rely on certain guarantees to more efficiently compute object connectivity that Git itself cannot make. Usage of this option without a reliable external mechanism to ensure full reachable object connectivity risks corrupting the repository and should not be used in the general case.

PRE-RECEIVE HOOK

Before any ref is updated, if $GIT_DIR/hooks/pre-receive file exists and is executable, it will be invoked once with no parameters. The standard input of the hook will be one line per ref to be updated:

sha1-old SP sha1-new SP refname LF

The refname value is relative to $GIT_DIR; e.g. for the master head this is "refs/heads/master". The two sha1 values before each refname are the object names for the refname before and after the update. Refs to be created will have sha1-old equal to 0{40}, while refs to be deleted will have sha1-new equal to 0{40}, otherwise sha1-old and sha1-new should be valid objects in the repository.

When accepting a signed push (see the section called “git-push(1)”), the signed push certificate is stored in a blob and an environment variable GIT_PUSH_CERT can be consulted for its object name. See the description of post-receive hook for an example. In addition, the certificate is verified using GPG and the result is exported with the following environment variables:

GIT_PUSH_CERT_SIGNER
The name and the e-mail address of the owner of the key that signed the push certificate.
GIT_PUSH_CERT_KEY
The GPG key ID of the key that signed the push certificate.
GIT_PUSH_CERT_STATUS
The status of GPG verification of the push certificate, using the same mnemonic as used in %G? format of git log family of commands (see the section called “git-log(1)”).
GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE
The nonce string the process asked the signer to include in the push certificate. If this does not match the value recorded on the "nonce" header in the push certificate, it may indicate that the certificate is a valid one that is being replayed from a separate "git push" session.
GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_STATUS
UNSOLICITED
"git push --signed" sent a nonce when we did not ask it to send one.
MISSING
"git push --signed" did not send any nonce header.
BAD
"git push --signed" sent a bogus nonce.
OK
"git push --signed" sent the nonce we asked it to send.
SLOP
"git push --signed" sent a nonce different from what we asked it to send now, but in a previous session. See GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_SLOP environment variable.
GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_SLOP
"git push --signed" sent a nonce different from what we asked it to send now, but in a different session whose starting time is different by this many seconds from the current session. Only meaningful when GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_STATUS says SLOP. Also read about receive.certNonceSlop variable in the section called “git-config(1)”.

This hook is called before any refname is updated and before any fast-forward checks are performed.

If the pre-receive hook exits with a non-zero exit status no updates will be performed, and the update, post-receive and post-update hooks will not be invoked either. This can be useful to quickly bail out if the update is not to be supported.

See the notes on the quarantine environment below.

UPDATE HOOK

Before each ref is updated, if $GIT_DIR/hooks/update file exists and is executable, it is invoked once per ref, with three parameters:

$GIT_DIR/hooks/update refname sha1-old sha1-new

The refname parameter is relative to $GIT_DIR; e.g. for the master head this is "refs/heads/master". The two sha1 arguments are the object names for the refname before and after the update. Note that the hook is called before the refname is updated, so either sha1-old is 0{40} (meaning there is no such ref yet), or it should match what is recorded in refname.

The hook should exit with non-zero status if it wants to disallow updating the named ref. Otherwise it should exit with zero.

Successful execution (a zero exit status) of this hook does not ensure the ref will actually be updated, it is only a prerequisite. As such it is not a good idea to send notices (e.g. email) from this hook. Consider using the post-receive hook instead.

POST-RECEIVE HOOK

After all refs were updated (or attempted to be updated), if any ref update was successful, and if $GIT_DIR/hooks/post-receive file exists and is executable, it will be invoked once with no parameters. The standard input of the hook will be one line for each successfully updated ref:

sha1-old SP sha1-new SP refname LF

The refname value is relative to $GIT_DIR; e.g. for the master head this is "refs/heads/master". The two sha1 values before each refname are the object names for the refname before and after the update. Refs that were created will have sha1-old equal to 0{40}, while refs that were deleted will have sha1-new equal to 0{40}, otherwise sha1-old and sha1-new should be valid objects in the repository.

The GIT_PUSH_CERT* environment variables can be inspected, just as in pre-receive hook, after accepting a signed push.

Using this hook, it is easy to generate mails describing the updates to the repository. This example script sends one mail message per ref listing the commits pushed to the repository, and logs the push certificates of signed pushes with good signatures to a logger service:

#!/bin/sh
# mail out commit update information.
while read oval nval ref
do
        if expr "$oval" : '0*$' >/dev/null
        then
                echo "Created a new ref, with the following commits:"
                git rev-list --pretty "$nval"
        else
                echo "New commits:"
                git rev-list --pretty "$nval" "^$oval"
        fi |
        mail -s "Changes to ref $ref" commit-list@mydomain
done
# log signed push certificate, if any
if test -n "${GIT_PUSH_CERT-}" && test ${GIT_PUSH_CERT_STATUS} = G
then
        (
                echo expected nonce is ${GIT_PUSH_NONCE}
                git cat-file blob ${GIT_PUSH_CERT}
        ) | mail -s "push certificate from $GIT_PUSH_CERT_SIGNER" push-log@mydomain
fi
exit 0

The exit code from this hook invocation is ignored, however a non-zero exit code will generate an error message.

Note that it is possible for refname to not have sha1-new when this hook runs. This can easily occur if another user modifies the ref after it was updated by git-receive-pack, but before the hook was able to evaluate it. It is recommended that hooks rely on sha1-new rather than the current value of refname.

POST-UPDATE HOOK

After all other processing, if at least one ref was updated, and if $GIT_DIR/hooks/post-update file exists and is executable, then post-update will be called with the list of refs that have been updated. This can be used to implement any repository wide cleanup tasks.

The exit code from this hook invocation is ignored; the only thing left for git-receive-pack to do at that point is to exit itself anyway.

This hook can be used, for example, to run git update-server-info if the repository is packed and is served via a dumb transport.

#!/bin/sh
exec git update-server-info

QUARANTINE ENVIRONMENT

When receive-pack takes in objects, they are placed into a temporary "quarantine" directory within the $GIT_DIR/objects directory and migrated into the main object store only after the pre-receive hook has completed. If the push fails before then, the temporary directory is removed entirely.

This has a few user-visible effects and caveats:

  1. Pushes which fail due to problems with the incoming pack, missing objects, or due to the pre-receive hook will not leave any on-disk data. This is usually helpful to prevent repeated failed pushes from filling up your disk, but can make debugging more challenging.
  2. Any objects created by the pre-receive hook will be created in the quarantine directory (and migrated only if it succeeds).
  3. The pre-receive hook MUST NOT update any refs to point to quarantined objects. Other programs accessing the repository will not be able to see the objects (and if the pre-receive hook fails, those refs would become corrupted). For safety, any ref updates from within pre-receive are automatically rejected.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-reflog(1)

NAME

git-reflog - Manage reflog information

SYNOPSIS

git reflog [show] [<log-options>] [<ref>]
git reflog list
git reflog expire [--expire=<time>] [--expire-unreachable=<time>]
        [--rewrite] [--updateref] [--stale-fix]
        [--dry-run | -n] [--verbose] [--all [--single-worktree] | <refs>…]
git reflog delete [--rewrite] [--updateref]
        [--dry-run | -n] [--verbose] <ref>@{<specifier>}…
git reflog drop [--all [--single-worktree] | <refs>…]
git reflog exists <ref>

DESCRIPTION

This command manages the information recorded in the reflogs.

Reference logs, or "reflogs", record when the tips of branches and other references were updated in the local repository. Reflogs are useful in various Git commands, to specify the old value of a reference. For example, HEAD@{2} means "where HEAD used to be two moves ago", master@{one.week.ago} means "where master used to point to one week ago in this local repository", and so on. See the section called “gitrevisions(7)” for more details.

The command takes various subcommands, and different options depending on the subcommand:

The "show" subcommand (which is also the default, in the absence of any subcommands) shows the log of the reference provided in the command-line (or HEAD, by default). The reflog covers all recent actions, and in addition the HEAD reflog records branch switching. git reflog show is an alias for git log -g --abbrev-commit --pretty=oneline; see the section called “git-log(1)” for more information.

The "list" subcommand lists all refs which have a corresponding reflog.

The "expire" subcommand prunes older reflog entries. Entries older than expire time, or entries older than expire-unreachable time and not reachable from the current tip, are removed from the reflog. This is typically not used directly by end users -- instead, see the section called “git-gc(1)”.

The "delete" subcommand deletes single entries from the reflog, but not the reflog itself. Its argument must be an exact entry (e.g. "git reflog delete master@{2}"). This subcommand is also typically not used directly by end users.

The "drop" subcommand completely removes the reflog for the specified references. This is in contrast to "expire" and "delete", both of which can be used to delete reflog entries, but not the reflog itself.

The "exists" subcommand checks whether a ref has a reflog. It exits with zero status if the reflog exists, and non-zero status if it does not.

OPTIONS

Options for show

git reflog show accepts any of the options accepted by git log.

Options for expire

--all
Process the reflogs of all references.
--single-worktree
By default when --all is specified, reflogs from all working trees are processed. This option limits the processing to reflogs from the current working tree only.
--expire=<time>
Prune entries older than the specified time. If this option is not specified, the expiration time is taken from the configuration setting gc.reflogExpire, which in turn defaults to 90 days. --expire=all prunes entries regardless of their age; --expire=never turns off pruning of reachable entries (but see --expire-unreachable).
--expire-unreachable=<time>
Prune entries older than <time> that are not reachable from the current tip of the branch. If this option is not specified, the expiration time is taken from the configuration setting gc.reflogExpireUnreachable, which in turn defaults to 30 days. --expire-unreachable=all prunes unreachable entries regardless of their age; --expire-unreachable=never turns off early pruning of unreachable entries (but see --expire).
--updateref
Update the reference to the value of the top reflog entry (i.e. <ref>@{0}) if the previous top entry was pruned. (This option is ignored for symbolic references.)
--rewrite
If a reflog entry's predecessor is pruned, adjust its "old" SHA-1 to be equal to the "new" SHA-1 field of the entry that now precedes it.
--stale-fix

Prune any reflog entries that point to "broken commits". A broken commit is a commit that is not reachable from any of the reference tips and that refers, directly or indirectly, to a missing commit, tree, or blob object.

This computation involves traversing all the reachable objects, i.e. it has the same cost as git prune. It is primarily intended to fix corruption caused by garbage collecting using older versions of Git, which didn't protect objects referred to by reflogs.

-n , --dry-run
Do not actually prune any entries; just show what would have been pruned.
--verbose
Print extra information on screen.

Options for delete

git reflog delete accepts options --updateref, --rewrite, -n, --dry-run, and --verbose, with the same meanings as when they are used with expire.

Options for drop

--all
Drop the reflogs of all references from all worktrees.
--single-worktree
By default when --all is specified, reflogs from all working trees are dropped. This option limits the processing to reflogs from the current working tree only.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-refs(1)

NAME

git-refs - Low-level access to refs

SYNOPSIS

git refs migrate --ref-format=<format> [--no-reflog] [--dry-run]
git refs verify [--strict] [--verbose]

DESCRIPTION

This command provides low-level access to refs.

COMMANDS

migrate
Migrate ref store between different formats.
verify
Verify reference database consistency.

OPTIONS

The following options are specific to git refs migrate:

--ref-format=<format>

The ref format to migrate the ref store to. Can be one of:

  • files for loose files with packed-refs. This is the default.
  • reftable for the reftable format. This format is experimental and its internals are subject to change.
--dry-run
Perform the migration, but do not modify the repository. The migrated refs will be written into a separate directory that can be inspected separately. The name of the directory will be reported on stdout. This can be used to double check that the migration works as expected before performing the actual migration.
--reflog , --no-reflog
Choose between migrating the reflog data to the new backend, and discarding them. The default is "--reflog", to migrate.

The following options are specific to git refs verify:

--strict
Enable stricter error checking. This will cause warnings to be reported as errors. See the section called “git-fsck(1)”.
--verbose
When verifying the reference database consistency, be chatty.

KNOWN LIMITATIONS

The ref format migration has several known limitations in its current form:

  • It is not possible to migrate repositories that have worktrees.
  • There is no way to block concurrent writes to the repository during an ongoing migration. Concurrent writes can lead to an inconsistent migrated state. Users are expected to block writes on a higher level. If your repository is registered for scheduled maintenance, it is recommended to unregister it first with git-maintenance(1).

These limitations may eventually be lifted.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-remote-ext(1)

NAME

git-remote-ext - Bridge smart transport to external command.

SYNOPSIS

git remote add <nick> "ext::<command>[ <arguments>…]"

DESCRIPTION

This remote helper uses the specified <command> to connect to a remote Git server.

Data written to stdin of the specified <command> is assumed to be sent to a git:// server, git-upload-pack, git-receive-pack or git-upload-archive (depending on situation), and data read from stdout of <command> is assumed to be received from the same service.

Command and arguments are separated by an unescaped space.

The following sequences have a special meaning:

'% '
Literal space in command or argument.
%%
Literal percent sign.
%s
Replaced with name (receive-pack, upload-pack, or upload-archive) of the service Git wants to invoke.
%S
Replaced with long name (git-receive-pack, git-upload-pack, or git-upload-archive) of the service Git wants to invoke.
%G (must be the first characters in an argument)

This argument will not be passed to <command>. Instead, it will cause the helper to start by sending git:// service requests to the remote side with the service field set to an appropriate value and the repository field set to the rest of the argument. Default is not to send such a request.

This is useful if the remote side is git:// server accessed over some tunnel.

%V (must be first characters in argument)
This argument will not be passed to <command>. Instead it sets the vhost field in the git:// service request (to the rest of the argument). Default is not to send vhost in such request (if sent).

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

GIT_TRANSLOOP_DEBUG
If set, prints debugging information about various reads/writes.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES PASSED TO COMMAND

GIT_EXT_SERVICE
Set to long name (git-upload-pack, etc…) of service helper needs to invoke.
GIT_EXT_SERVICE_NOPREFIX
Set to long name (upload-pack, etc…) of service helper needs to invoke.

EXAMPLES

This remote helper is transparently used by Git when you use commands such as "git fetch <URL>", "git clone <URL>", , "git push <URL>" or "git remote add <nick> <URL>", where <URL> begins with ext::. Examples:

"ext::ssh -i /home/foo/.ssh/somekey user@host.example %S foo/repo"
Like host.example:foo/repo, but use /home/foo/.ssh/somekey as keypair and user as the user on the remote side. This avoids the need to edit .ssh/config.
"ext::socat -t3600 - ABSTRACT-CONNECT:/git-server %G/somerepo"
Represents repository with path /somerepo accessible over git protocol at the abstract namespace address /git-server.
"ext::git-server-alias foo %G/repo"
Represents a repository with path /repo accessed using the helper program "git-server-alias foo". The path to the repository and type of request are not passed on the command line but as part of the protocol stream, as usual with git:// protocol.
"ext::git-server-alias foo %G/repo %Vfoo"
Represents a repository with path /repo accessed using the helper program "git-server-alias foo". The hostname for the remote server passed in the protocol stream will be "foo" (this allows multiple virtual Git servers to share a link-level address).
"ext::git-server-alias foo %G/repo% with% spaces %Vfoo"
Represents a repository with path /repo with spaces accessed using the helper program "git-server-alias foo". The hostname for the remote server passed in the protocol stream will be "foo" (this allows multiple virtual Git servers to share a link-level address).
"ext::git-ssl foo.example /bar"
Represents a repository accessed using the helper program "git-ssl foo.example /bar". The type of request can be determined by the helper using environment variables (see above).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-remote-fd(1)

NAME

git-remote-fd - Reflect smart transport stream back to caller

SYNOPSIS

"fd::<infd>[,<outfd>][/<anything>]" (as URL)

DESCRIPTION

This helper uses specified file descriptors to connect to a remote Git server. This is not meant for end users but for programs and scripts calling git fetch, push, or archive.

If only <infd> is given, it is assumed to be a bidirectional socket connected to a remote Git server (git-upload-pack, git-receive-pack, or git-upload-archive). If both <infd> and <outfd> are given, they are assumed to be pipes connected to a remote Git server (<infd> being the inbound pipe and <outfd> being the outbound pipe).

It is assumed that any handshaking procedures have already been completed (such as sending service request for git://) before this helper is started.

<anything> can be any string. It is ignored. It is meant for providing information to the user in the URL in case that URL is displayed in some context.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

GIT_TRANSLOOP_DEBUG
If set, prints debugging information about various reads/writes.

EXAMPLES

git fetch fd::17 master
Fetch master, using file descriptor #17 to communicate with git-upload-pack.
git fetch fd::17/foo master
Same as above.
git push fd::7,8 master (as URL)
Push master, using file descriptor #7 to read data from git-receive-pack and file descriptor #8 to write data to the same service.
git push fd::7,8/bar master
Same as above.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-remote(1)

NAME

git-remote - Manage set of tracked repositories

SYNOPSIS

git remote [-v | --verbose]
git remote add [-t <branch>] [-m <master>] [-f] [--[no-]tags] [--mirror=(fetch|push)] <name> <URL>
git remote rename [--[no-]progress] <old> <new>
git remote remove <name>
git remote set-head <name> (-a | --auto | -d | --delete | <branch>)
git remote set-branches [--add] <name> <branch>…
git remote get-url [--push] [--all] <name>
git remote set-url [--push] <name> <newurl> [<oldurl>]
git remote set-url --add [--push] <name> <newurl>
git remote set-url --delete [--push] <name> <URL>
git remote [-v | --verbose] show [-n] <name>…
git remote prune [-n | --dry-run] <name>…
git remote [-v | --verbose] update [-p | --prune] [(<group> | <remote>)…]

DESCRIPTION

Manage the set of repositories ("remotes") whose branches you track.

OPTIONS

-v , --verbose
Be a little more verbose and show remote url after name. For promisor remotes, also show which filters (blob:none etc.) are configured. NOTE: This must be placed between remote and subcommand.

COMMANDS

With no arguments, shows a list of existing remotes. Several subcommands are available to perform operations on the remotes.

add

Add a remote named <name> for the repository at <URL>. The command git fetch <name> can then be used to create and update remote-tracking branches <name>/<branch>.

With -f option, git fetch <name> is run immediately after the remote information is set up.

With --tags option, git fetch <name> imports every tag from the remote repository.

With --no-tags option, git fetch <name> does not import tags from the remote repository.

By default, only tags on fetched branches are imported (see the section called “git-fetch(1)”).

With -t <branch> option, instead of the default glob refspec for the remote to track all branches under the refs/remotes/<name>/ namespace, a refspec to track only <branch> is created. You can give more than one -t <branch> to track multiple branches without grabbing all branches.

With -m <master> option, a symbolic-ref refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD is set up to point at remote's <master> branch. See also the set-head command.

When a fetch mirror is created with --mirror=fetch, the refs will not be stored in the refs/remotes/ namespace, but rather everything in refs/ on the remote will be directly mirrored into refs/ in the local repository. This option only makes sense in bare repositories, because a fetch would overwrite any local commits.

When a push mirror is created with --mirror=push, then git push will always behave as if --mirror was passed.

rename

Rename the remote named <old> to <new>. All remote-tracking branches and configuration settings for the remote are updated.

In case <old> and <new> are the same, and <old> is a file under $GIT_DIR/remotes or $GIT_DIR/branches, the remote is converted to the configuration file format.

remove , rm
Remove the remote named <name>. All remote-tracking branches and configuration settings for the remote are removed.
set-head

Sets or deletes the default branch (i.e. the target of the symbolic-ref refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD) for the named remote. Having a default branch for a remote is not required, but allows the name of the remote to be specified in lieu of a specific branch. For example, if the default branch for origin is set to master, then origin may be specified wherever you would normally specify origin/master.

With -d or --delete, the symbolic ref refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD is deleted.

With -a or --auto, the remote is queried to determine its HEAD, then the symbolic-ref refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD is set to the same branch. e.g., if the remote HEAD is pointed at next, git remote set-head origin -a will set the symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD to refs/remotes/origin/next. This will only work if refs/remotes/origin/next already exists; if not it must be fetched first.

Use <branch> to set the symbolic-ref refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD explicitly. e.g., git remote set-head origin master will set the symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD to refs/remotes/origin/master. This will only work if refs/remotes/origin/master already exists; if not it must be fetched first.

set-branches

Changes the list of branches tracked by the named remote. This can be used to track a subset of the available remote branches after the initial setup for a remote.

The named branches will be interpreted as if specified with the -t option on the git remote add command line.

With --add, instead of replacing the list of currently tracked branches, adds to that list.

get-url

Retrieves the URLs for a remote. Configurations for insteadOf and pushInsteadOf are expanded here. By default, only the first URL is listed.

With --push, push URLs are queried rather than fetch URLs.

With --all, all URLs for the remote will be listed.

set-url

Changes URLs for the remote. Sets first URL for remote <name> that matches regex <oldurl> (first URL if no <oldurl> is given) to <newurl>. If <oldurl> doesn't match any URL, an error occurs and nothing is changed.

With --push, push URLs are manipulated instead of fetch URLs.

With --add, instead of changing existing URLs, new URL is added.

With --delete, instead of changing existing URLs, all URLs matching regex <URL> are deleted for remote <name>. Trying to delete all non-push URLs is an error.

Note that the push URL and the fetch URL, even though they can be set differently, must still refer to the same place. What you pushed to the push URL should be what you would see if you immediately fetched from the fetch URL. If you are trying to fetch from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another (e.g. your publishing repository), use two separate remotes.

show

Gives some information about the remote <name>.

With -n option, the remote heads are not queried first with git ls-remote <name>; cached information is used instead.

prune

Deletes stale references associated with <name>. By default, stale remote-tracking branches under <name> are deleted, but depending on global configuration and the configuration of the remote we might even prune local tags that haven't been pushed there. Equivalent to git fetch --prune <name>, except that no new references will be fetched.

See the PRUNING section of the section called “git-fetch(1)” for what it'll prune depending on various configuration.

With --dry-run option, report what branches would be pruned, but do not actually prune them.

update

Fetch updates for remotes or remote groups in the repository as defined by remotes.<group>. If neither group nor remote is specified on the command line, the configuration parameter remotes.default will be used; if remotes.default is not defined, all remotes which do not have the configuration parameter remote.<name>.skipDefaultUpdate set to true will be updated. (See the section called “git-config(1)”).

With --prune option, run pruning against all the remotes that are updated.

DISCUSSION

The remote configuration is achieved using the remote.origin.url and remote.origin.fetch configuration variables. (See the section called “git-config(1)”).

EXIT STATUS

On success, the exit status is 0.

When subcommands such as add, rename, and remove can't find the remote in question, the exit status is 2. When the remote already exists, the exit status is 3.

On any other error, the exit status may be any other non-zero value.

EXAMPLES

  • Add a new remote, fetch, and check out a branch from it

    $ git remote
    origin
    $ git branch -r
      origin/HEAD -> origin/master
      origin/master
    $ git remote add staging git://git.kernel.org/.../gregkh/staging.git
    $ git remote
    origin
    staging
    $ git fetch staging
    ...
    From git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging
     * [new branch]      master     -> staging/master
     * [new branch]      staging-linus -> staging/staging-linus
     * [new branch]      staging-next -> staging/staging-next
    $ git branch -r
      origin/HEAD -> origin/master
      origin/master
      staging/master
      staging/staging-linus
      staging/staging-next
    $ git switch -c staging staging/master
    ...
  • Imitate git clone but track only selected branches

    $ mkdir project.git
    $ cd project.git
    $ git init
    $ git remote add -f -t master -m master origin git://example.com/git.git/
    $ git merge origin

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-repack(1)

NAME

git-repack - Pack unpacked objects in a repository

SYNOPSIS

git repack [-a] [-A] [-d] [-f] [-F] [-l] [-n] [-q] [-b] [-m]
        [--window=<n>] [--depth=<n>] [--threads=<n>] [--keep-pack=<pack-name>]
        [--write-midx] [--name-hash-version=<n>]

DESCRIPTION

This command is used to combine all objects that do not currently reside in a "pack", into a pack. It can also be used to re-organize existing packs into a single, more efficient pack.

A pack is a collection of objects, individually compressed, with delta compression applied, stored in a single file, with an associated index file.

Packs are used to reduce the load on mirror systems, backup engines, disk storage, etc.

OPTIONS

-a

Instead of incrementally packing the unpacked objects, pack everything referenced into a single pack. Especially useful when packing a repository that is used for private development. Use with -d. This will clean up the objects that git prune leaves behind, but git fsck --full --dangling shows as dangling.

Note that users fetching over dumb protocols will have to fetch the whole new pack in order to get any contained object, no matter how many other objects in that pack they already have locally.

Promisor packfiles are repacked separately: if there are packfiles that have an associated ".promisor" file, these packfiles will be repacked into another separate pack, and an empty ".promisor" file corresponding to the new separate pack will be written.

-A
Same as -a, unless -d is used. Then any unreachable objects in a previous pack become loose, unpacked objects, instead of being left in the old pack. Unreachable objects are never intentionally added to a pack, even when repacking. This option prevents unreachable objects from being immediately deleted by way of being left in the old pack and then removed. Instead, the loose unreachable objects will be pruned according to normal expiry rules with the next git gc invocation. See the section called “git-gc(1)”.
-d
After packing, if the newly created packs make some existing packs redundant, remove the redundant packs. Also run git prune-packed to remove redundant loose object files.
--cruft
Same as -a, unless -d is used. Then any unreachable objects are packed into a separate cruft pack. Unreachable objects can be pruned using the normal expiry rules with the next git gc invocation (see the section called “git-gc(1)”). Incompatible with -k.
--cruft-expiration=<approxidate>
Expire unreachable objects older than <approxidate> immediately instead of waiting for the next git gc invocation. Only useful with --cruft -d.
--max-cruft-size=<n>
Overrides --max-pack-size for cruft packs. Inherits the value of --max-pack-size (if any) by default. See the documentation for --max-pack-size for more details.
--combine-cruft-below-size=<n>
When generating cruft packs without pruning, only repack existing cruft packs whose size is strictly less than <n>, where <n> represents a number of bytes, which can optionally be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". Cruft packs whose size is greater than or equal to <n> are left as-is and not repacked. Useful when you want to avoid repacking large cruft pack(s) in repositories that have many and/or large unreachable objects.
--expire-to=<dir>
Write a cruft pack containing pruned objects (if any) to the directory <dir>. This option is useful for keeping a copy of any pruned objects in a separate directory as a backup. Only useful with --cruft -d.
-l
Pass the --local option to git pack-objects. See the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
-f
Pass the --no-reuse-delta option to git-pack-objects, see the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
-F
Pass the --no-reuse-object option to git-pack-objects, see the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
-q , --quiet
Show no progress over the standard error stream and pass the -q option to git pack-objects. See the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
-n
Do not update the server information with git update-server-info. This option skips updating local catalog files needed to publish this repository (or a direct copy of it) over HTTP or FTP. See the section called “git-update-server-info(1)”.
--window=<n> , --depth=<n>

These two options affect how the objects contained in the pack are stored using delta compression. The objects are first internally sorted by type, size and optionally names and compared against the other objects within --window to see if using delta compression saves space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker side, because delta data needs to be applied that many times to get to the necessary object.

The default value for --window is 10 and --depth is 50. The maximum depth is 4095.

--threads=<n>
This option is passed through to git pack-objects.
--window-memory=<n>
This option provides an additional limit on top of --window; the window size will dynamically scale down so as to not take up more than <n> bytes in memory. This is useful in repositories with a mix of large and small objects to not run out of memory with a large window, but still be able to take advantage of the large window for the smaller objects. The size can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". --window-memory=0 makes memory usage unlimited. The default is taken from the pack.windowMemory configuration variable. Note that the actual memory usage will be the limit multiplied by the number of threads used by the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
--max-pack-size=<n>
Maximum size of each output pack file. The size can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". The minimum size allowed is limited to 1 MiB. If specified, multiple packfiles may be created, which also prevents the creation of a bitmap index. The default is unlimited, unless the config variable pack.packSizeLimit is set. Note that this option may result in a larger and slower repository; see the discussion in pack.packSizeLimit.
--filter=<filter-spec>
Remove objects matching the filter specification from the resulting packfile and put them into a separate packfile. Note that objects used in the working directory are not filtered out. So for the split to fully work, it's best to perform it in a bare repo and to use the -a and -d options along with this option. Also --no-write-bitmap-index (or the repack.writebitmaps config option set to false) should be used otherwise writing bitmap index will fail, as it supposes a single packfile containing all the objects. See the section called “git-rev-list(1)” for valid <filter-spec> forms.
--filter-to=<dir>
Write the pack containing filtered out objects to the directory <dir>. Only useful with --filter. This can be used for putting the pack on a separate object directory that is accessed through the Git alternates mechanism. WARNING: If the packfile containing the filtered out objects is not accessible, the repo can become corrupt as it might not be possible to access the objects in that packfile. See the objects and objects/info/alternates sections of the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)”.
-b , --write-bitmap-index
Write a reachability bitmap index as part of the repack. This only makes sense when used with -a, -A or -m, as the bitmaps must be able to refer to all reachable objects. This option overrides the setting of repack.writeBitmaps. This option has no effect if multiple packfiles are created, unless writing a MIDX (in which case a multi-pack bitmap is created).
--pack-kept-objects
Include objects in .keep files when repacking. Note that we still do not delete .keep packs after pack-objects finishes. This means that we may duplicate objects, but this makes the option safe to use when there are concurrent pushes or fetches. This option is generally only useful if you are writing bitmaps with -b or repack.writeBitmaps, as it ensures that the bitmapped packfile has the necessary objects.
--keep-pack=<pack-name>
Exclude the given pack from repacking. This is the equivalent of having .keep file on the pack. <pack-name> is the pack file name without leading directory (e.g. pack-123.pack). The option can be specified multiple times to keep multiple packs.
--unpack-unreachable=<when>
When loosening unreachable objects, do not bother loosening any objects older than <when>. This can be used to optimize out the write of any objects that would be immediately pruned by a follow-up git prune.
-k , --keep-unreachable
When used with -ad, any unreachable objects from existing packs will be appended to the end of the packfile instead of being removed. In addition, any unreachable loose objects will be packed (and their loose counterparts removed).
-i , --delta-islands
Pass the --delta-islands option to git-pack-objects, see the section called “git-pack-objects(1)”.
-g<factor> , --geometric=<factor>

Arrange resulting pack structure so that each successive pack contains at least <factor> times the number of objects as the next-largest pack.

git repack ensures this by determining a "cut" of packfiles that need to be repacked into one in order to ensure a geometric progression. It picks the smallest set of packfiles such that as many of the larger packfiles (by count of objects contained in that pack) may be left intact.

Unlike other repack modes, the set of objects to pack is determined uniquely by the set of packs being "rolled-up"; in other words, the packs determined to need to be combined in order to restore a geometric progression.

Loose objects are implicitly included in this "roll-up", without respect to their reachability. This is subject to change in the future.

When writing a multi-pack bitmap, git repack selects the largest resulting pack as the preferred pack for object selection by the MIDX (see the section called “git-multi-pack-index(1)”).

-m , --write-midx
Write a multi-pack index (see the section called “git-multi-pack-index(1)”) containing the non-redundant packs.
--name-hash-version=<n>
Provide this argument to the underlying git pack-objects process. See the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” for full details.

CONFIGURATION

Various configuration variables affect packing, see the section called “git-config(1)” (search for "pack" and "delta").

By default, the command passes --delta-base-offset option to git pack-objects; this typically results in slightly smaller packs, but the generated packs are incompatible with versions of Git older than version 1.4.4. If you need to share your repository with such ancient Git versions, either directly or via the dumb http protocol, then you need to set the configuration variable repack.UseDeltaBaseOffset to "false" and repack. Access from old Git versions over the native protocol is unaffected by this option as the conversion is performed on the fly as needed in that case.

Delta compression is not used on objects larger than the core.bigFileThreshold configuration variable and on files with the attribute delta set to false.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-replace(1)

NAME

git-replace - Create, list, delete refs to replace objects

SYNOPSIS

git replace [-f] <object> <replacement>
git replace [-f] --edit <object>
git replace [-f] --graft <commit> [<parent>…]
git replace [-f] --convert-graft-file
git replace -d <object>…
git replace [--format=<format>] [-l [<pattern>]]

DESCRIPTION

Adds a replace reference in refs/replace/ namespace.

The name of the replace reference is the SHA-1 of the object that is replaced. The content of the replace reference is the SHA-1 of the replacement object.

The replaced object and the replacement object must be of the same type. This restriction can be bypassed using -f.

Unless -f is given, the replace reference must not yet exist.

There is no other restriction on the replaced and replacement objects. Merge commits can be replaced by non-merge commits and vice versa.

Replacement references will be used by default by all Git commands except those doing reachability traversal (prune, pack transfer and fsck).

It is possible to disable the use of replacement references for any command using the --no-replace-objects option just after git.

For example if commit foo has been replaced by commit bar:

$ git --no-replace-objects cat-file commit foo

shows information about commit foo, while:

$ git cat-file commit foo

shows information about commit bar.

The GIT_NO_REPLACE_OBJECTS environment variable can be set to achieve the same effect as the --no-replace-objects option.

OPTIONS

-f , --force
If an existing replace ref for the same object exists, it will be overwritten (instead of failing).
-d , --delete
Delete existing replace refs for the given objects.
--edit <object>
Edit an object's content interactively. The existing content for <object> is pretty-printed into a temporary file, an editor is launched on the file, and the result is parsed to create a new object of the same type as <object>. A replacement ref is then created to replace <object> with the newly created object. See the section called “git-var(1)” for details about how the editor will be chosen.
--raw
When editing, provide the raw object contents rather than pretty-printed ones. Currently this only affects trees, which will be shown in their binary form. This is harder to work with, but can help when repairing a tree that is so corrupted it cannot be pretty-printed. Note that you may need to configure your editor to cleanly read and write binary data.
--graft <commit> [<parent>…]
Create a graft commit. A new commit is created with the same content as <commit> except that its parents will be [<parent>…] instead of <commit>'s parents. A replacement ref is then created to replace <commit> with the newly created commit. Use --convert-graft-file to convert a $GIT_DIR/info/grafts file and use replace refs instead.
--convert-graft-file
Creates graft commits for all entries in $GIT_DIR/info/grafts and deletes that file upon success. The purpose is to help users with transitioning off of the now-deprecated graft file.
-l <pattern> , --list <pattern>
List replace refs for objects that match the given pattern (or all if no pattern is given). Typing "git replace" without arguments, also lists all replace refs.
--format=<format>
When listing, use the specified <format>, which can be one of short, medium and long. When omitted, the format defaults to short.

FORMATS

The following formats are available:

  • short: <replaced-sha1>
  • medium: <replaced-sha1> → <replacement-sha1>
  • long: <replaced-sha1> (<replaced-type>) → <replacement-sha1> (<replacement-type>)

CREATING REPLACEMENT OBJECTS

the section called “git-hash-object(1)”, the section called “git-rebase(1)”, and git-filter-repo, among other git commands, can be used to create replacement objects from existing objects. The --edit option can also be used with git replace to create a replacement object by editing an existing object.

If you want to replace many blobs, trees or commits that are part of a string of commits, you may just want to create a replacement string of commits and then only replace the commit at the tip of the target string of commits with the commit at the tip of the replacement string of commits.

BUGS

Comparing blobs or trees that have been replaced with those that replace them will not work properly. And using git reset --hard to go back to a replaced commit will move the branch to the replacement commit instead of the replaced commit.

There may be other problems when using git rev-list related to pending objects.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-replay(1)

NAME

git-replay - EXPERIMENTAL: Replay commits on a new base, works with bare repos too

SYNOPSIS

(EXPERIMENTAL!) git replay ([--contained] --onto <newbase> | --advance <branch>) <revision-range>…

DESCRIPTION

Takes ranges of commits and replays them onto a new location. Leaves the working tree and the index untouched, and updates no references. The output of this command is meant to be used as input to git update-ref --stdin, which would update the relevant branches (see the OUTPUT section below).

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.

OPTIONS

--onto <newbase>

Starting point at which to create the new commits. May be any valid commit, and not just an existing branch name.

When --onto is specified, the update-ref command(s) in the output will update the branch(es) in the revision range to point at the new commits, similar to the way how git rebase --update-refs updates multiple branches in the affected range.

--advance <branch>

Starting point at which to create the new commits; must be a branch name.

When --advance is specified, the update-ref command(s) in the output will update the branch passed as an argument to --advance to point at the new commits (in other words, this mimics a cherry-pick operation).

<revision-range>
Range of commits to replay. More than one <revision-range> can be passed, but in --advance <branch> mode, they should have a single tip, so that it's clear where <branch> should point to. See "Specifying Ranges" in the section called “git-rev-parse(1)” and the "Commit Limiting" options below.

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

-<number> , -n <number> , --max-count=<number>
Limit the number of commits to output.
--skip=<number>
Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output.
--since=<date> , --after=<date>
Show commits more recent than a specific date.
--since-as-filter=<date>
Show all commits more recent than a specific date. This visits all commits in the range, rather than stopping at the first commit which is older than a specific date.
--until=<date> , --before=<date>
Show commits older than a specific date.
--author=<pattern> , --committer=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --author=<pattern>, commits whose author matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for multiple --committer=<pattern>).
--grep-reflog=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep-reflog, commits whose reflog message matches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is an error to use this option unless --walk-reflogs is in use.
--grep=<pattern>

Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep=<pattern>, commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).

When --notes is in effect, the message from the notes is matched as if it were part of the log message.

--all-match
Limit the commits output to ones that match all given --grep, instead of ones that match at least one.
--invert-grep
Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that do not match the pattern specified with --grep=<pattern>.
-i , --regexp-ignore-case
Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard to letter case.
--basic-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions; this is the default.
-E , --extended-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions instead of the default basic regular expressions.
-F , --fixed-strings
Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don't interpret pattern as a regular expression).
-P , --perl-regexp

Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--remove-empty
Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.
--merges
Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as --min-parents=2.
--no-merges
Do not print commits with more than one parent. This is exactly the same as --max-parents=1.
--min-parents=<number> , --max-parents=<number> , --no-min-parents , --no-max-parents

Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parent commits. In particular, --max-parents=1 is the same as --no-merges, --min-parents=2 is the same as --merges. --max-parents=0 gives all root commits and --min-parents=3 all octopus merges.

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

--first-parent
When finding commits to include, follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge.
--exclude-first-parent-only
When finding commits to exclude (with a ^), follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This can be used to find the set of changes in a topic branch from the point where it diverged from the remote branch, given that arbitrary merges can be valid topic branch changes.
--not
Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not. When used on the command line before --stdin, the revisions passed through stdin will not be affected by it. Conversely, when passed via standard input, the revisions passed on the command line will not be affected by it.
--all
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--branches[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--tags[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--remotes[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--glob=<glob-pattern>
Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern> are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/, is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--exclude=<glob-pattern>

Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]
Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch, git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with transfer.hideRefs (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This option affects the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared after processing them.
--reflog
Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--alternate-refs
Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternate repositories were listed on the command line. An alternate repository is any repository whose object directory is specified in objects/info/alternates. The set of included objects may be modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--single-worktree
By default, all working trees will be examined by the following options when there are more than one (see the section called “git-worktree(1)”): --all, --reflog and --indexed-objects. This option forces them to examine the current working tree only.
--ignore-missing
Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if the bad input was not given.
--bisect
Pretend as if the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad was listed and as if it was followed by --not and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* on the command line.
--stdin
In addition to getting arguments from the command line, read them from standard input as well. This accepts commits and pseudo-options like --all and --glob=. When a -- separator is seen, the following input is treated as paths and used to limit the result. Flags like --not which are read via standard input are only respected for arguments passed in the same way and will not influence any subsequent command line arguments.
--cherry-mark
Like --cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commits with = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.
--cherry-pick

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the other side when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, 3rd on b may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

--left-only , --right-only

List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric difference, i.e. only those which would be marked < resp. > by --left-right.

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

--cherry
A synonym for --right-only --cherry-mark --no-merges; useful to limit the output to the commits on our side and mark those that have been applied to the other side of a forked history with git log --cherry upstream...mybranch, similar to git cherry upstream mybranch.
-g , --walk-reflogs

Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones. When this option is used you cannot specify commits to exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2, and commit1...commit2 notations cannot be used).

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry), depending on a few rules:

  1. If the starting point is specified as ref@{<Nth>}, show the index format.
  2. If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show the timestamp format.
  3. If neither was used, but --date was given on the command line, show the timestamp in the format requested by --date.
  4. Otherwise, show the index format.

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also the section called “git-reflog(1)”.

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

--merge
Show commits touching conflicted paths in the range HEAD...<other>, where <other> is the first existing pseudoref in MERGE_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD or REBASE_HEAD. Only works when the index has unmerged entries. This option can be used to show relevant commits when resolving conflicts from a 3-way merge.
--boundary
Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits are prefixed with -.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

<paths>
Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.
--simplify-by-decoration
Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

Default mode
Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches with the same content)
--show-pulls
Include all commits from the default mode, but also any merge commits that are not TREESAME to the first parent but are TREESAME to a later parent. This mode is helpful for showing the merge commits that "first introduced" a change to a branch.
--full-history
Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.
--dense
Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history.
--sparse
All commits in the simplified history are shown.
--simplify-merges
Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.
--ancestry-path[=<commit>]
When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), and a commit <commit> in that range, only display commits in that range that are ancestors of <commit>, descendants of <commit>, or <commit> itself. If no commit is specified, use commit1 (the excluded part of the range) as <commit>. Can be passed multiple times; if so, a commit is included if it is any of the commits given or if it is an ancestor or descendant of one of them.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /   /
        I     B   C   D   E   Y
         \   /   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A---Q is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:

  • I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents asdf, and a file quux exists with contents quux. Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
  • In A, foo contains just foo.
  • B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents.
  • C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to foobar, so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • D sets foo to baz. Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to foobarbaz; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • E changes quux to xyzzy, and its merge P combines the strings to quux xyzzy. P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.
  • X is an independent root commit that added a new file side, and Y modified it. Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added side to P, and Q is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding commits based on whether --full-history and/or parent rewriting (via --parents or --children) are used. The following settings are available.

Default mode

Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see --sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents.

This results in:

          .-A---N---O
         /     /   /
        I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

--full-history without parent rewriting

This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them. Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get

        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

--full-history with parent rewriting

Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see --sparse below).

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /
        I     B   /   D   /
         \   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'

Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N, and X, Y and Q.

In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion:

--dense
Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent.
--sparse

All commits that are walked are included.

Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.

--simplify-merges

First, build a history graph in the same way that --full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

  • Set C' to C.
  • Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. In the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents or that are root commits TREESAME to an empty tree, and remove duplicates, but take care to never drop all parents that we are TREESAME to.
  • If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (has zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains. Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

          .-A---M---N---O
         /     /       /
        I     B       D
         \   /       /
          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

  • N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.
  • P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
  • Q's parent list had Y simplified to X. X was then removed, because it was a TREESAME root. Q was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.

There is another simplification mode available:

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

Limit the displayed commits to those which are an ancestor of <commit>, or which are a descendant of <commit>, or are <commit> itself.

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

            D---E-------F
           /     \       \
          B---C---G---H---I---J
         /                     \
        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that what does M have that did not exist in D. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

                E-------F
                 \       \
                  G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

                E
                 \
              C---G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                K---------------L--M

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file's simplified history. Let's demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `---Y--'

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

        I---X

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

          .-A---M--------N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `------'

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

          .-A---M--.
         /     /    \
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

--show-pulls

In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME to a later parent.

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

          .-A---M--.   N
         /     /    \ /
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

The --simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).

Commit Ordering

By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.

--date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.
--author-date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the author timestamp order.
--topo-order

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed.

For example, in a commit history like this:

    ---1----2----4----7
        \              \
         3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With --topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

--reverse
Output the commits chosen to be shown (see Commit Limiting section above) in reverse order. Cannot be combined with --walk-reflogs.

Object Traversal

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

--no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]
Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors. This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argument unsorted is given, the commits are shown in the order they were given on the command line. Otherwise (if sorted or no argument was given), the commits are shown in reverse chronological order by commit time. Cannot be combined with --graph.
--do-walk
Overrides a previous --no-walk.

Commit Formatting

--pretty[=<format>] , --format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format> were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

--no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit, either explicit or implied by other options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.
--oneline
This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.
--encoding=<encoding>
Commit objects record the character encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output the original object verbatim.
--expand-tabs=<n> , --expand-tabs , --no-expand-tabs

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>) in the log message before showing it in the output. --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format, or --oneline option given on the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

With an optional <ref> argument, use the ref to find the notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name of the ref.

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "--notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "--notes=foo --notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

--no-notes
Do not show notes. This negates the above --notes option, by resetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown. Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g. "--notes --notes=foo --no-notes --notes=bar" will only show notes from "refs/notes/bar".
--show-notes-by-default
Show the default notes unless options for displaying specific notes are given.
--show-notes[=<ref>] , --[no-]standard-notes
These options are deprecated. Use the above --notes/--no-notes options instead.
--show-signature
Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signature to gpg --verify and show the output.
--relative-date
Synonym for --date=relative.
--date=<format>

Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, such as when using --pretty. log.date config variable sets a default value for the log command's --date option. By default, dates are shown in the original time zone (either committer's or author's). If -local is appended to the format (e.g., iso-local), the user's local time zone is used instead.

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. 2 hours ago. The -local option has no effect for --date=relative.

--date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

  • a space instead of the T date/time delimiter
  • a space between time and time zone
  • no colon between hours and minutes of the time zone

--date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strict ISO 8601 format.

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in email messages.

--date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

--date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

--date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match the current time-zone, and doesn't print the whole date if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it's in the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale's preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

--date=default is the default format, and is based on ctime(3) output. It shows a single line with three-letter day of the week, three-letter month, day-of-month, hour-minute-seconds in "HH:MM:SS" format, followed by 4-digit year, plus timezone information, unless the local time zone is used, e.g. Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000.

--parents
Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit parent…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--children
Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit child…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--left-right

Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is reachable from. Commits from the left side are prefixed with < and those from the right with >. If combined with --boundary, those commits are prefixed with -.

For example, if you have this topology:

             y---b---b  branch B
            / \ /
           /   .
          /   / \
         o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

        $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B

        >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
        >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
        <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
        <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
        -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
        -xxxxxxx... 1st on a
--graph

Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history on the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra lines to be printed in between commits, in order for the graph history to be drawn properly. Cannot be combined with --no-walk.

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.

--show-linear-break[=<barrier>]
When --graph is not used, all history branches are flattened which can make it hard to see that the two consecutive commits do not belong to a linear branch. This option puts a barrier in between them in that case. If <barrier> is specified, it is the string that will be shown instead of the default one.

OUTPUT

When there are no conflicts, the output of this command is usable as input to git update-ref --stdin. It is of the form:

update refs/heads/branch1 ${NEW_branch1_HASH} ${OLD_branch1_HASH}
update refs/heads/branch2 ${NEW_branch2_HASH} ${OLD_branch2_HASH}
update refs/heads/branch3 ${NEW_branch3_HASH} ${OLD_branch3_HASH}

where the number of refs updated depends on the arguments passed and the shape of the history being replayed. When using --advance, the number of refs updated is always one, but for --onto, it can be one or more (rebasing multiple branches simultaneously is supported).

EXIT STATUS

For a successful, non-conflicted replay, the exit status is 0. When the replay has conflicts, the exit status is 1. If the replay is not able to complete (or start) due to some kind of error, the exit status is something other than 0 or 1.

EXAMPLES

To simply rebase mybranch onto target:

$ git replay --onto target origin/main..mybranch
update refs/heads/mybranch ${NEW_mybranch_HASH} ${OLD_mybranch_HASH}

To cherry-pick the commits from mybranch onto target:

$ git replay --advance target origin/main..mybranch
update refs/heads/target ${NEW_target_HASH} ${OLD_target_HASH}

Note that the first two examples replay the exact same commits and on top of the exact same new base, they only differ in that the first provides instructions to make mybranch point at the new commits and the second provides instructions to make target point at them.

What if you have a stack of branches, one depending upon another, and you'd really like to rebase the whole set?

$ git replay --contained --onto origin/main origin/main..tipbranch
update refs/heads/branch1 ${NEW_branch1_HASH} ${OLD_branch1_HASH}
update refs/heads/branch2 ${NEW_branch2_HASH} ${OLD_branch2_HASH}
update refs/heads/tipbranch ${NEW_tipbranch_HASH} ${OLD_tipbranch_HASH}

When calling git replay, one does not need to specify a range of commits to replay using the syntax A..B; any range expression will do:

$ git replay --onto origin/main ^base branch1 branch2 branch3
update refs/heads/branch1 ${NEW_branch1_HASH} ${OLD_branch1_HASH}
update refs/heads/branch2 ${NEW_branch2_HASH} ${OLD_branch2_HASH}
update refs/heads/branch3 ${NEW_branch3_HASH} ${OLD_branch3_HASH}

This will simultaneously rebase branch1, branch2, and branch3, all commits they have since base, playing them on top of origin/main. These three branches may have commits on top of base that they have in common, but that does not need to be the case.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-request-pull(1)

NAME

git-request-pull - Generates a summary of pending changes

SYNOPSIS

git request-pull [-p] <start> <URL> [<end>]

DESCRIPTION

Generate a request asking your upstream project to pull changes into their tree. The request, printed to the standard output, begins with the branch description, summarizes the changes, and indicates from where they can be pulled.

The upstream project is expected to have the commit named by <start> and the output asks it to integrate the changes you made since that commit, up to the commit named by <end>, by visiting the repository named by <URL>.

OPTIONS

-p
Include patch text in the output.
<start>
Commit to start at. This names a commit that is already in the upstream history.
<URL>
The repository URL to be pulled from.
<end>

Commit to end at (defaults to HEAD). This names the commit at the tip of the history you are asking to be pulled.

When the repository named by <URL> has the commit at a tip of a ref that is different from the ref you have locally, you can use the <local>:<remote> syntax, to have its local name, a colon :, and its remote name.

EXAMPLES

Imagine that you built your work on your master branch on top of the v1.0 release, and want it to be integrated into the project. First you push that change to your public repository for others to see:

git push https://git.ko.xz/project master

Then, you run this command:

git request-pull v1.0 https://git.ko.xz/project master

which will produce a request to the upstream, summarizing the changes between the v1.0 release and your master, to pull it from your public repository.

If you pushed your change to a branch whose name is different from the one you have locally, e.g.

git push https://git.ko.xz/project master:for-linus

then you can ask that to be pulled with

git request-pull v1.0 https://git.ko.xz/project master:for-linus

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-rerere(1)

NAME

git-rerere - Reuse recorded resolution of conflicted merges

SYNOPSIS

git rerere [clear | forget <pathspec>… | diff | status | remaining | gc]

DESCRIPTION

In a workflow employing relatively long lived topic branches, the developer sometimes needs to resolve the same conflicts over and over again until the topic branches are done (either merged to the "release" branch, or sent out and accepted upstream).

This command assists the developer in this process by recording conflicted automerge results and corresponding hand resolve results on the initial manual merge, and applying previously recorded hand resolutions to their corresponding automerge results.

Note

You need to set the configuration variable rerere.enabled in order to enable this command.

COMMANDS

Normally, git rerere is run without arguments or user-intervention. However, it has several commands that allow it to interact with its working state.

clear
Reset the metadata used by rerere if a merge resolution is to be aborted. Calling git am [--skip|--abort] or git rebase [--skip|--abort] will automatically invoke this command.
forget <pathspec>
Reset the conflict resolutions which rerere has recorded for the current conflict in <pathspec>.
diff
Display diffs for the current state of the resolution. It is useful for tracking what has changed while the user is resolving conflicts. Additional arguments are passed directly to the system diff command installed in PATH.
status
Print paths with conflicts whose merge resolution rerere will record.
remaining
Print paths with conflicts that have not been autoresolved by rerere. This includes paths whose resolutions cannot be tracked by rerere, such as conflicting submodules.
gc
Prune records of conflicted merges that occurred a long time ago. By default, unresolved conflicts older than 15 days and resolved conflicts older than 60 days are pruned. These defaults are controlled via the gc.rerereUnresolved and gc.rerereResolved configuration variables respectively.

DISCUSSION

When your topic branch modifies an overlapping area that your master branch (or upstream) touched since your topic branch forked from it, you may want to test it with the latest master, even before your topic branch is ready to be pushed upstream:

              o---*---o topic
             /
    o---o---o---*---o---o master

For such a test, you need to merge master and topic somehow. One way to do it is to pull master into the topic branch:

        $ git switch topic
        $ git merge master

              o---*---o---+ topic
             /           /
    o---o---o---*---o---o master

The commits marked with * touch the same area in the same file; you need to resolve the conflicts when creating the commit marked with +. Then you can test the result to make sure your work-in-progress still works with what is in the latest master.

After this test merge, there are two ways to continue your work on the topic. The easiest is to build on top of the test merge commit +, and when your work in the topic branch is finally ready, pull the topic branch into master, and/or ask the upstream to pull from you. By that time, however, the master or the upstream might have been advanced since the test merge +, in which case the final commit graph would look like this:

        $ git switch topic
        $ git merge master
        $ ... work on both topic and master branches
        $ git switch master
        $ git merge topic

              o---*---o---+---o---o topic
             /           /         \
    o---o---o---*---o---o---o---o---+ master

When your topic branch is long-lived, however, your topic branch would end up having many such "Merge from master" commits on it, which would unnecessarily clutter the development history. Readers of the Linux kernel mailing list may remember that Linus complained about such too frequent test merges when a subsystem maintainer asked to pull from a branch full of "useless merges".

As an alternative, to keep the topic branch clean of test merges, you could blow away the test merge, and keep building on top of the tip before the test merge:

        $ git switch topic
        $ git merge master
        $ git reset --hard HEAD^ ;# rewind the test merge
        $ ... work on both topic and master branches
        $ git switch master
        $ git merge topic

              o---*---o-------o---o topic
             /                     \
    o---o---o---*---o---o---o---o---+ master

This would leave only one merge commit when your topic branch is finally ready and merged into the master branch. This merge would require you to resolve the conflict, introduced by the commits marked with *. However, this conflict is often the same conflict you resolved when you created the test merge you blew away. git rerere helps you resolve this final conflicted merge using the information from your earlier hand resolve.

Running the git rerere command immediately after a conflicted automerge records the conflicted working tree files, with the usual conflict markers <<<<<<<, =======, and >>>>>>> in them. Later, after you are done resolving the conflicts, running git rerere again will record the resolved state of these files. Suppose you did this when you created the test merge of master into the topic branch.

Next time, after seeing the same conflicted automerge, running git rerere will perform a three-way merge between the earlier conflicted automerge, the earlier manual resolution, and the current conflicted automerge. If this three-way merge resolves cleanly, the result is written out to your working tree file, so you do not have to manually resolve it. Note that git rerere leaves the index file alone, so you still need to do the final sanity checks with git diff (or git diff -c) and git add when you are satisfied.

As a convenience measure, git merge automatically invokes git rerere upon exiting with a failed automerge and git rerere records the hand resolve when it is a new conflict, or reuses the earlier hand resolve when it is not. git commit also invokes git rerere when committing a merge result. What this means is that you do not have to do anything special yourself (besides enabling the rerere.enabled config variable).

In our example, when you do the test merge, the manual resolution is recorded, and it will be reused when you do the actual merge later with the updated master and topic branch, as long as the recorded resolution is still applicable.

The information git rerere records is also used when running git rebase. After blowing away the test merge and continuing development on the topic branch:

              o---*---o-------o---o topic
             /
    o---o---o---*---o---o---o---o   master

        $ git rebase master topic

                                  o---*---o-------o---o topic
                                 /
    o---o---o---*---o---o---o---o   master

you could run git rebase master topic, to bring yourself up to date before your topic is ready to be sent upstream. This would result in falling back to a three-way merge, and it would conflict the same way as the test merge you resolved earlier. git rerere will be run by git rebase to help you resolve this conflict.

[NOTE] git rerere relies on the conflict markers in the file to detect the conflict. If the file already contains lines that look the same as lines with conflict markers, git rerere may fail to record a conflict resolution. To work around this, the conflict-marker-size setting in the section called “gitattributes(5)” can be used.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-reset(1)

NAME

git-reset - Reset current HEAD to the specified state

SYNOPSIS

git reset [-q] [<tree-ish>] [--<pathspec>
git reset [-q] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]] [<tree-ish>]
git reset (--patch | -p) [<tree-ish>] [--] [<pathspec>]
git reset [--soft | --mixed [-N] | --hard | --merge | --keep] [-q] [<commit>]

DESCRIPTION

In the first three forms, copy entries from <tree-ish> to the index. In the last form, set the current branch head (HEAD) to <commit>, optionally modifying index and working tree to match. The <tree-ish>/<commit> defaults to HEAD in all forms.

git reset [-q] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>... , git reset [-q] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]] [<tree-ish>]

These forms reset the index entries for all paths that match the <pathspec> to their state at <tree-ish>. (It does not affect the working tree or the current branch.)

This means that git reset <pathspec> is the opposite of git add <pathspec>. This command is equivalent to git restore [--source=<tree-ish>] --staged <pathspec>....

After running git reset <pathspec> to update the index entry, you can use the section called “git-restore(1)” to check the contents out of the index to the working tree. Alternatively, using the section called “git-restore(1)” and specifying a commit with --source, you can copy the contents of a path out of a commit to the index and to the working tree in one go.

git reset (--patch | -p) [<tree-ish>] [--] [<pathspec>...]

Interactively select hunks in the difference between the index and <tree-ish> (defaults to HEAD). The chosen hunks are applied in reverse to the index.

This means that git reset -p is the opposite of git add -p, i.e. you can use it to selectively reset hunks. See the "Interactive Mode" section of the section called “git-add(1)” to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

git reset [<mode>] [<commit>]

This form resets the current branch head to <commit> and possibly updates the index (resetting it to the tree of <commit>) and the working tree depending on <mode>. Before the operation, ORIG_HEAD is set to the tip of the current branch. If <mode> is omitted, defaults to --mixed. The <mode> must be one of the following:

--soft
Does not touch the index file or the working tree at all (but resets the head to <commit>, just like all modes do). This leaves all your changed files "Changes to be committed", as git status would put it.
--mixed

Resets the index but not the working tree (i.e., the changed files are preserved but not marked for commit) and reports what has not been updated. This is the default action.

If -N is specified, removed paths are marked as intent-to-add (see the section called “git-add(1)”).

--hard
Resets the index and working tree. Any changes to tracked files in the working tree since <commit> are discarded. Any untracked files or directories in the way of writing any tracked files are simply deleted.
--merge

Resets the index and updates the files in the working tree that are different between <commit> and HEAD, but keeps those which are different between the index and working tree (i.e. which have changes which have not been added). If a file that is different between <commit> and the index has unstaged changes, reset is aborted.

In other words, --merge does something like a git read-tree -u -m <commit>, but carries forward unmerged index entries.

--keep
Resets index entries and updates files in the working tree that are different between <commit> and HEAD. If a file that is different between <commit> and HEAD has local changes, reset is aborted.
--[no-]recurse-submodules
When the working tree is updated, using --recurse-submodules` will also recursively reset the working tree of all active submodules according to the commit recorded in the superproject, also setting the submodules HEAD to be detached at that commit.

See "Reset, restore and revert" in the section called “git(1)” for the differences between the three commands.

OPTIONS

-q , --quiet
Be quiet, only report errors.
--refresh , --no-refresh
Refresh the index after a mixed reset. Enabled by default.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<pathspec>...

Limits the paths affected by the operation.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

EXAMPLES

Undo add
$ edit                                     1
$ git add frotz.c filfre.c
$ mailx                                    2
$ git reset                                3
$ git pull git://info.example.com/ nitfol  4

1

You are happily working on something, and find the changes in these files are in good order. You do not want to see them when you run git diff, because you plan to work on other files and changes with these files are distracting.

2

Somebody asks you to pull, and the changes sound worthy of merging.

3

However, you already dirtied the index (i.e. your index does not match the HEAD commit). But you know the pull you are going to make does not affect frotz.c or filfre.c, so you revert the index changes for these two files. Your changes in working tree remain there.

4

Then you can pull and merge, leaving frotz.c and filfre.c changes still in the working tree.

Undo a commit and redo
$ git commit ...
$ git reset --soft HEAD^      1
$ edit                        2
$ git commit -a -c ORIG_HEAD  3

1

This is most often done when you remembered what you just committed is incomplete, or you misspelled your commit message, or both. Leaves working tree as it was before "reset".

2

Make corrections to working tree files.

3

"reset" copies the old head to .git/ORIG_HEAD; redo the commit by starting with its log message. If you do not need to edit the message further, you can give -C option instead.

See also the --amend option to the section called “git-commit(1)”.

Undo a commit, making it a topic branch
$ git branch topic/wip          1
$ git reset --hard HEAD~3       2
$ git switch topic/wip          3

1

You have made some commits, but realize they were premature to be in the master branch. You want to continue polishing them in a topic branch, so create topic/wip branch off of the current HEAD.

2

Rewind the master branch to get rid of those three commits.

3

Switch to topic/wip branch and keep working.

Undo commits permanently
$ git commit ...
$ git reset --hard HEAD~3   1

1

The last three commits (HEAD, HEAD^, and HEAD~2) were bad and you do not want to ever see them again. Do not do this if you have already given these commits to somebody else. (See the "RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in the section called “git-rebase(1)” for the implications of doing so.)

Undo a merge or pull
$ git pull                         1
Auto-merging nitfol
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in nitfol
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
$ git reset --hard                 2
$ git pull . topic/branch          3
Updating from 41223... to 13134...
Fast-forward
$ git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD       4

1

Try to update from the upstream resulted in a lot of conflicts; you were not ready to spend a lot of time merging right now, so you decide to do that later.

2

"pull" has not made merge commit, so git reset --hard which is a synonym for git reset --hard HEAD clears the mess from the index file and the working tree.

3

Merge a topic branch into the current branch, which resulted in a fast-forward.

4

But you decided that the topic branch is not ready for public consumption yet. "pull" or "merge" always leaves the original tip of the current branch in ORIG_HEAD, so resetting hard to it brings your index file and the working tree back to that state, and resets the tip of the branch to that commit.

Undo a merge or pull inside a dirty working tree
$ git pull                         1
Auto-merging nitfol
Merge made by recursive.
 nitfol                |   20 +++++----
 ...
$ git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD      2

1

Even if you may have local modifications in your working tree, you can safely say git pull when you know that the change in the other branch does not overlap with them.

2

After inspecting the result of the merge, you may find that the change in the other branch is unsatisfactory. Running git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD will let you go back to where you were, but it will discard your local changes, which you do not want. git reset --merge keeps your local changes.

Interrupted workflow

Suppose you are interrupted by an urgent fix request while you are in the middle of a large change. The files in your working tree are not in any shape to be committed yet, but you need to get to the other branch for a quick bugfix.

$ git switch feature  ;# you were working in "feature" branch and
$ work work work      ;# got interrupted
$ git commit -a -m "snapshot WIP"                 1
$ git switch master
$ fix fix fix
$ git commit ;# commit with real log
$ git switch feature
$ git reset --soft HEAD^ ;# go back to WIP state  2
$ git reset                                       3

1

This commit will get blown away so a throw-away log message is OK.

2

This removes the WIP commit from the commit history, and sets your working tree to the state just before you made that snapshot.

3

At this point the index file still has all the WIP changes you committed as snapshot WIP. This updates the index to show your WIP files as uncommitted.

See also the section called “git-stash(1)”.

Reset a single file in the index

Suppose you have added a file to your index, but later decide you do not want to add it to your commit. You can remove the file from the index while keeping your changes with git reset.

$ git reset -- frotz.c                      1
$ git commit -m "Commit files in index"     2
$ git add frotz.c                           3

1

This removes the file from the index while keeping it in the working directory.

2

This commits all other changes in the index.

3

Adds the file to the index again.

Keep changes in working tree while discarding some previous commits

Suppose you are working on something and you commit it, and then you continue working a bit more, but now you think that what you have in your working tree should be in another branch that has nothing to do with what you committed previously. You can start a new branch and reset it while keeping the changes in your working tree.

$ git tag start
$ git switch -c branch1
$ edit
$ git commit ...                            1
$ edit
$ git switch -c branch2                     2
$ git reset --keep start                    3

1

This commits your first edits in branch1.

2

In the ideal world, you could have realized that the earlier commit did not belong to the new topic when you created and switched to branch2 (i.e. git switch -c branch2 start), but nobody is perfect.

3

But you can use reset --keep to remove the unwanted commit after you switched to branch2.

Split a commit apart into a sequence of commits

Suppose that you have created lots of logically separate changes and committed them together. Then, later you decide that it might be better to have each logical chunk associated with its own commit. You can use git reset to rewind history without changing the contents of your local files, and then successively use git add -p to interactively select which hunks to include into each commit, using git commit -c to pre-populate the commit message.

$ git reset -N HEAD^                        1
$ git add -p                                2
$ git diff --cached                         3
$ git commit -c HEAD@{1}                    4
...                                         5
$ git add ...                               6
$ git diff --cached                         7
$ git commit ...                            8

1

First, reset the history back one commit so that we remove the original commit, but leave the working tree with all the changes. The -N ensures that any new files added with HEAD are still marked so that git add -p will find them.

2

Next, we interactively select diff hunks to add using the git add -p facility. This will ask you about each diff hunk in sequence and you can use simple commands such as "yes, include this", "No don't include this" or even the very powerful "edit" facility.

3

Once satisfied with the hunks you want to include, you should verify what has been prepared for the first commit by using git diff --cached. This shows all the changes that have been moved into the index and are about to be committed.

4

Next, commit the changes stored in the index. The -c option specifies to pre-populate the commit message from the original message that you started with in the first commit. This is helpful to avoid retyping it. The HEAD@{1} is a special notation for the commit that HEAD used to be at prior to the original reset commit (1 change ago). See the section called “git-reflog(1)” for more details. You may also use any other valid commit reference.

5

You can repeat steps 2-4 multiple times to break the original code into any number of commits.

6

Now you've split out many of the changes into their own commits, and might no longer use the patch mode of git add, in order to select all remaining uncommitted changes.

7

Once again, check to verify that you've included what you want to. You may also wish to verify that git diff doesn't show any remaining changes to be committed later.

8

And finally create the final commit.

DISCUSSION

The tables below show what happens when running:

git reset --option target

to reset the HEAD to another commit (target) with the different reset options depending on the state of the files.

In these tables, A, B, C and D are some different states of a file. For example, the first line of the first table means that if a file is in state A in the working tree, in state B in the index, in state C in HEAD and in state D in the target, then git reset --soft target will leave the file in the working tree in state A and in the index in state B. It resets (i.e. moves) the HEAD (i.e. the tip of the current branch, if you are on one) to target (which has the file in state D).

working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 A       B     C    D     --soft   A       B     D
                          --mixed  A       D     D
                          --hard   D       D     D
                          --merge (disallowed)
                          --keep  (disallowed)
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 A       B     C    C     --soft   A       B     C
                          --mixed  A       C     C
                          --hard   C       C     C
                          --merge (disallowed)
                          --keep   A       C     C
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 B       B     C    D     --soft   B       B     D
                          --mixed  B       D     D
                          --hard   D       D     D
                          --merge  D       D     D
                          --keep  (disallowed)
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 B       B     C    C     --soft   B       B     C
                          --mixed  B       C     C
                          --hard   C       C     C
                          --merge  C       C     C
                          --keep   B       C     C
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 B       C     C    D     --soft   B       C     D
                          --mixed  B       D     D
                          --hard   D       D     D
                          --merge (disallowed)
                          --keep  (disallowed)
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 B       C     C    C     --soft   B       C     C
                          --mixed  B       C     C
                          --hard   C       C     C
                          --merge  B       C     C
                          --keep   B       C     C

git reset --merge is meant to be used when resetting out of a conflicted merge. Any mergy operation guarantees that the working tree file that is involved in the merge does not have a local change with respect to the index before it starts, and that it writes the result out to the working tree. So if we see some difference between the index and the target and also between the index and the working tree, then it means that we are not resetting out from a state that a mergy operation left after failing with a conflict. That is why we disallow --merge option in this case.

git reset --keep is meant to be used when removing some of the last commits in the current branch while keeping changes in the working tree. If there could be conflicts between the changes in the commit we want to remove and the changes in the working tree we want to keep, the reset is disallowed. That's why it is disallowed if there are both changes between the working tree and HEAD, and between HEAD and the target. To be safe, it is also disallowed when there are unmerged entries.

The following tables show what happens when there are unmerged entries:

working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 X       U     A    B     --soft  (disallowed)
                          --mixed  X       B     B
                          --hard   B       B     B
                          --merge  B       B     B
                          --keep  (disallowed)
working index HEAD target         working index HEAD
----------------------------------------------------
 X       U     A    A     --soft  (disallowed)
                          --mixed  X       A     A
                          --hard   A       A     A
                          --merge  A       A     A
                          --keep  (disallowed)

X means any state and U means an unmerged index.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-restore(1)

NAME

git-restore - Restore working tree files

SYNOPSIS

git restore [<options>] [--source=<tree>] [--staged] [--worktree] [--<pathspec>
git restore [<options>] [--source=<tree>] [--staged] [--worktree--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]
git restore (-p|--patch) [<options>] [--source=<tree>] [--staged] [--worktree] [--] [<pathspec>]

DESCRIPTION

Restore specified paths in the working tree with some contents from a restore source. If a path is tracked but does not exist in the restore source, it will be removed to match the source.

The command can also be used to restore the content in the index with --staged, or restore both the working tree and the index with --staged --worktree.

By default, if --staged is given, the contents are restored from HEAD, otherwise from the index. Use --source to restore from a different commit.

See "Reset, restore and revert" in the section called “git(1)” for the differences between the three commands.

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.

OPTIONS

-s <tree> , --source=<tree>

Restore the working tree files with the content from the given tree. It is common to specify the source tree by naming a commit, branch or tag associated with it.

If not specified, the contents are restored from HEAD if --staged is given, otherwise from the index.

As a special case, you may use "<rev-A>...<rev-B>" as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-A> and <rev-B> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-A>_ and <rev-B>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

-p , --patch
Interactively select hunks in the difference between the restore source and the restore location. See the "Interactive Mode" section of the section called “git-add(1)” to learn how to operate the --patch mode.
-W , --worktree , -S , --staged
Specify the restore location. If neither option is specified, by default the working tree is restored. Specifying --staged will only restore the index. Specifying both restores both.
-q , --quiet
Quiet, suppress feedback messages. Implies --no-progress.
--progress , --no-progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --quiet is specified. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a terminal, regardless of --quiet.
--ours , --theirs

When restoring files in the working tree from the index, use stage #2 (ours) or #3 (theirs) for unmerged paths. This option cannot be used when checking out paths from a tree-ish (i.e. with the --source option).

Note that during git rebase and git pull --rebase, ours and theirs may appear swapped. See the explanation of the same options in the section called “git-checkout(1)” for details.

-m , --merge
When restoring files on the working tree from the index, recreate the conflicted merge in the unmerged paths. This option cannot be used when checking out paths from a tree-ish (i.e. with the --source option).
--conflict=<style>
The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the merge.conflictStyle configuration variable. Possible values are merge (default), diff3, and zdiff3.
--ignore-unmerged
When restoring files on the working tree from the index, do not abort the operation if there are unmerged entries and neither --ours, --theirs, --merge or --conflict is specified. Unmerged paths on the working tree are left alone.
--ignore-skip-worktree-bits
In sparse checkout mode, the default is to only update entries matched by <pathspec> and sparse patterns in $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout. This option ignores the sparse patterns and unconditionally restores any files in <pathspec>.
--recurse-submodules , --no-recurse-submodules
If <pathspec> names an active submodule and the restore location includes the working tree, the submodule will only be updated if this option is given, in which case its working tree will be restored to the commit recorded in the superproject, and any local modifications overwritten. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used, submodules working trees will not be updated. Just like the section called “git-checkout(1)”, this will detach HEAD of the submodule.
--overlay , --no-overlay
In overlay mode, never remove files when restoring. In no-overlay mode, remove tracked files that do not appear in the <tree> of --source=<tree>, to make them match <tree> exactly. The default is no-overlay mode.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<pathspec>...

Limits the paths affected by the operation.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

EXAMPLES

The following sequence switches to the master branch, reverts the Makefile to two revisions back, deletes hello.c by mistake, and gets it back from the index.

$ git switch master
$ git restore --source master~2 Makefile  1
$ rm -f hello.c
$ git restore hello.c                     2

1

take a file out of another commit

2

restore hello.c from the index

If you want to restore all C source files to match the version in the index, you can say

$ git restore '*.c'

Note the quotes around *.c. The file hello.c will also be restored, even though it is no longer in the working tree, because the file globbing is used to match entries in the index (not in the working tree by the shell).

To restore all files in the current directory

$ git restore .

or to restore all working tree files with top pathspec magic (see the section called “gitglossary(7)”)

$ git restore :/

To restore a file in the index to match the version in HEAD (this is the same as using the section called “git-reset(1)”)

$ git restore --staged hello.c

or you can restore both the index and the working tree (this is the same as using the section called “git-checkout(1)”)

$ git restore --source=HEAD --staged --worktree hello.c

or the short form which is more practical but less readable:

$ git restore -s@ -SW hello.c

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-rev-list(1)

NAME

git-rev-list - Lists commit objects in reverse chronological order

SYNOPSIS

git rev-list [<options>] <commit>… [--] [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

List commits that are reachable by following the parent links from the given commit(s), but exclude commits that are reachable from the one(s) given with a ^ in front of them. The output is given in reverse chronological order by default.

You can think of this as a set operation. Commits reachable from any of the commits given on the command line form a set, and then commits reachable from any of the ones given with ^ in front are subtracted from that set. The remaining commits are what comes out in the command's output. Various other options and paths parameters can be used to further limit the result.

Thus, the following command:

$ git rev-list foo bar ^baz

means "list all the commits which are reachable from foo or bar, but not from baz".

A special notation "<commit1>..<commit2>" can be used as a short-hand for "^<commit1> <commit2>". For example, either of the following may be used interchangeably:

$ git rev-list origin..HEAD
$ git rev-list HEAD ^origin

Another special notation is "<commit1><commit2>" which is useful for merges. The resulting set of commits is the symmetric difference between the two operands. The following two commands are equivalent:

$ git rev-list A B --not $(git merge-base --all A B)
$ git rev-list A...B

rev-list is an essential Git command, since it provides the ability to build and traverse commit ancestry graphs. For this reason, it has a lot of different options that enable it to be used by commands as different as git bisect and git repack.

OPTIONS

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

-<number> , -n <number> , --max-count=<number>
Limit the number of commits to output.
--skip=<number>
Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output.
--since=<date> , --after=<date>
Show commits more recent than a specific date.
--since-as-filter=<date>
Show all commits more recent than a specific date. This visits all commits in the range, rather than stopping at the first commit which is older than a specific date.
--until=<date> , --before=<date>
Show commits older than a specific date.
--max-age=<timestamp> , --min-age=<timestamp>
Limit the commits output to specified time range.
--author=<pattern> , --committer=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --author=<pattern>, commits whose author matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for multiple --committer=<pattern>).
--grep-reflog=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep-reflog, commits whose reflog message matches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is an error to use this option unless --walk-reflogs is in use.
--grep=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep=<pattern>, commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).
--all-match
Limit the commits output to ones that match all given --grep, instead of ones that match at least one.
--invert-grep
Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that do not match the pattern specified with --grep=<pattern>.
-i , --regexp-ignore-case
Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard to letter case.
--basic-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions; this is the default.
-E , --extended-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions instead of the default basic regular expressions.
-F , --fixed-strings
Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don't interpret pattern as a regular expression).
-P , --perl-regexp

Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--remove-empty
Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.
--merges
Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as --min-parents=2.
--no-merges
Do not print commits with more than one parent. This is exactly the same as --max-parents=1.
--min-parents=<number> , --max-parents=<number> , --no-min-parents , --no-max-parents

Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parent commits. In particular, --max-parents=1 is the same as --no-merges, --min-parents=2 is the same as --merges. --max-parents=0 gives all root commits and --min-parents=3 all octopus merges.

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

--first-parent
When finding commits to include, follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge.
--exclude-first-parent-only
When finding commits to exclude (with a ^), follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This can be used to find the set of changes in a topic branch from the point where it diverged from the remote branch, given that arbitrary merges can be valid topic branch changes.
--not
Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not. When used on the command line before --stdin, the revisions passed through stdin will not be affected by it. Conversely, when passed via standard input, the revisions passed on the command line will not be affected by it.
--all
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--branches[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--tags[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--remotes[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--glob=<glob-pattern>
Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern> are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/, is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--exclude=<glob-pattern>

Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]
Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch, git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with transfer.hideRefs (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This option affects the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared after processing them.
--reflog
Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--alternate-refs
Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternate repositories were listed on the command line. An alternate repository is any repository whose object directory is specified in objects/info/alternates. The set of included objects may be modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--single-worktree
By default, all working trees will be examined by the following options when there are more than one (see the section called “git-worktree(1)”): --all, --reflog and --indexed-objects. This option forces them to examine the current working tree only.
--ignore-missing
Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if the bad input was not given.
--stdin
In addition to getting arguments from the command line, read them from standard input as well. This accepts commits and pseudo-options like --all and --glob=. When a -- separator is seen, the following input is treated as paths and used to limit the result. Flags like --not which are read via standard input are only respected for arguments passed in the same way and will not influence any subsequent command line arguments.
--quiet
Don't print anything to standard output. This form is primarily meant to allow the caller to test the exit status to see if a range of objects is fully connected (or not). It is faster than redirecting stdout to /dev/null as the output does not have to be formatted.
--disk-usage , --disk-usage=human
Suppress normal output; instead, print the sum of the bytes used for on-disk storage by the selected commits or objects. This is equivalent to piping the output into git cat-file --batch-check='%(objectsize:disk)', except that it runs much faster (especially with --use-bitmap-index). See the CAVEATS section in the section called “git-cat-file(1)” for the limitations of what "on-disk storage" means. With the optional value human, on-disk storage size is shown in human-readable string(e.g. 12.24 Kib, 3.50 Mib).
--cherry-mark
Like --cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commits with = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.
--cherry-pick

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the other side when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, 3rd on b may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

--left-only , --right-only

List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric difference, i.e. only those which would be marked < resp. > by --left-right.

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

--cherry
A synonym for --right-only --cherry-mark --no-merges; useful to limit the output to the commits on our side and mark those that have been applied to the other side of a forked history with git log --cherry upstream...mybranch, similar to git cherry upstream mybranch.
-g , --walk-reflogs

Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones. When this option is used you cannot specify commits to exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2, and commit1...commit2 notations cannot be used).

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry), depending on a few rules:

  1. If the starting point is specified as ref@{<Nth>}, show the index format.
  2. If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show the timestamp format.
  3. If neither was used, but --date was given on the command line, show the timestamp in the format requested by --date.
  4. Otherwise, show the index format.

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also the section called “git-reflog(1)”.

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

--merge
Show commits touching conflicted paths in the range HEAD...<other>, where <other> is the first existing pseudoref in MERGE_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD or REBASE_HEAD. Only works when the index has unmerged entries. This option can be used to show relevant commits when resolving conflicts from a 3-way merge.
--boundary
Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits are prefixed with -.
--use-bitmap-index
Try to speed up the traversal using the pack bitmap index (if one is available). Note that when traversing with --objects, trees and blobs will not have their associated path printed.
--progress=<header>
Show progress reports on stderr as objects are considered. The <header> text will be printed with each progress update.
-z

Instead of being newline-delimited, each outputted object and its accompanying metadata is delimited using NUL bytes. Output is printed in the following form:

<OID> NUL [<token>=<value> NUL]...

Additional object metadata, such as object paths or boundary objects, is printed using the <token>=<value> form. Token values are printed as-is without any encoding/truncation. An OID entry never contains a = character and thus is used to signal the start of a new object record. Examples:

<OID> NUL
<OID> NUL path=<path> NUL
<OID> NUL boundary=yes NUL
<OID> NUL missing=yes NUL [<token>=<value> NUL]...

This mode is only compatible with the --objects, --boundary, and --missing output options.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

<paths>
Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.
--simplify-by-decoration
Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

Default mode
Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches with the same content)
--show-pulls
Include all commits from the default mode, but also any merge commits that are not TREESAME to the first parent but are TREESAME to a later parent. This mode is helpful for showing the merge commits that "first introduced" a change to a branch.
--full-history
Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.
--dense
Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history.
--sparse
All commits in the simplified history are shown.
--simplify-merges
Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.
--ancestry-path[=<commit>]
When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), and a commit <commit> in that range, only display commits in that range that are ancestors of <commit>, descendants of <commit>, or <commit> itself. If no commit is specified, use commit1 (the excluded part of the range) as <commit>. Can be passed multiple times; if so, a commit is included if it is any of the commits given or if it is an ancestor or descendant of one of them.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /   /
        I     B   C   D   E   Y
         \   /   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A---Q is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:

  • I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents asdf, and a file quux exists with contents quux. Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
  • In A, foo contains just foo.
  • B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents.
  • C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to foobar, so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • D sets foo to baz. Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to foobarbaz; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • E changes quux to xyzzy, and its merge P combines the strings to quux xyzzy. P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.
  • X is an independent root commit that added a new file side, and Y modified it. Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added side to P, and Q is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding commits based on whether --full-history and/or parent rewriting (via --parents or --children) are used. The following settings are available.

Default mode

Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see --sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents.

This results in:

          .-A---N---O
         /     /   /
        I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

--full-history without parent rewriting

This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them. Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get

        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

--full-history with parent rewriting

Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see --sparse below).

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /
        I     B   /   D   /
         \   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'

Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N, and X, Y and Q.

In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion:

--dense
Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent.
--sparse

All commits that are walked are included.

Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.

--simplify-merges

First, build a history graph in the same way that --full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

  • Set C' to C.
  • Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. In the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents or that are root commits TREESAME to an empty tree, and remove duplicates, but take care to never drop all parents that we are TREESAME to.
  • If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (has zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains. Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

          .-A---M---N---O
         /     /       /
        I     B       D
         \   /       /
          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

  • N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.
  • P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
  • Q's parent list had Y simplified to X. X was then removed, because it was a TREESAME root. Q was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.

There is another simplification mode available:

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

Limit the displayed commits to those which are an ancestor of <commit>, or which are a descendant of <commit>, or are <commit> itself.

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

            D---E-------F
           /     \       \
          B---C---G---H---I---J
         /                     \
        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that what does M have that did not exist in D. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

                E-------F
                 \       \
                  G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

                E
                 \
              C---G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                K---------------L--M

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file's simplified history. Let's demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `---Y--'

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

        I---X

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

          .-A---M--------N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `------'

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

          .-A---M--.
         /     /    \
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

--show-pulls

In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME to a later parent.

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

          .-A---M--.   N
         /     /    \ /
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

The --simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).

Bisection Helpers

--bisect

Limit output to the one commit object which is roughly halfway between included and excluded commits. Note that the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad is added to the included commits (if it exists) and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* are added to the excluded commits (if they exist). Thus, supposing there are no refs in refs/bisect/, if

        $ git rev-list --bisect foo ^bar ^baz

outputs midpoint, the output of the two commands

        $ git rev-list foo ^midpoint
        $ git rev-list midpoint ^bar ^baz

would be of roughly the same length. Finding the change which introduces a regression is thus reduced to a binary search: repeatedly generate and test new 'midpoint's until the commit chain is of length one.

--bisect-vars
This calculates the same as --bisect, except that refs in refs/bisect/ are not used, and except that this outputs text ready to be eval'ed by the shell. These lines will assign the name of the midpoint revision to the variable bisect_rev, and the expected number of commits to be tested after bisect_rev is tested to bisect_nr, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisect_rev turns out to be good to bisect_good, the expected number of commits to be tested if bisect_rev turns out to be bad to bisect_bad, and the number of commits we are bisecting right now to bisect_all.
--bisect-all

This outputs all the commit objects between the included and excluded commits, ordered by their distance to the included and excluded commits. Refs in refs/bisect/ are not used. The farthest from them is displayed first. (This is the only one displayed by --bisect.)

This is useful because it makes it easy to choose a good commit to test when you want to avoid to test some of them for some reason (they may not compile for example).

This option can be used along with --bisect-vars, in this case, after all the sorted commit objects, there will be the same text as if --bisect-vars had been used alone.

Commit Ordering

By default, the commits are shown in reverse chronological order.

--date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the commit timestamp order.
--author-date-order
Show no parents before all of its children are shown, but otherwise show commits in the author timestamp order.
--topo-order

Show no parents before all of its children are shown, and avoid showing commits on multiple lines of history intermixed.

For example, in a commit history like this:

    ---1----2----4----7
        \              \
         3----5----6----8---

where the numbers denote the order of commit timestamps, git rev-list and friends with --date-order show the commits in the timestamp order: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

With --topo-order, they would show 8 6 5 3 7 4 2 1 (or 8 7 4 2 6 5 3 1); some older commits are shown before newer ones in order to avoid showing the commits from two parallel development track mixed together.

--reverse
Output the commits chosen to be shown (see Commit Limiting section above) in reverse order. Cannot be combined with --walk-reflogs.

Object Traversal

These options are mostly targeted for packing of Git repositories.

--objects
Print the object IDs of any object referenced by the listed commits. --objects foo ^bar thus means send me all object IDs which I need to download if I have the commit object bar but not foo. See also --object-names below.
--in-commit-order
Print tree and blob ids in order of the commits. The tree and blob ids are printed after they are first referenced by a commit.
--objects-edge
Similar to --objects, but also print the IDs of excluded commits prefixed with a - character. This is used by the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” to build a thin pack, which records objects in deltified form based on objects contained in these excluded commits to reduce network traffic.
--objects-edge-aggressive
Similar to --objects-edge, but it tries harder to find excluded commits at the cost of increased time. This is used instead of --objects-edge to build thin packs for shallow repositories.
--indexed-objects
Pretend as if all trees and blobs used by the index are listed on the command line. Note that you probably want to use --objects, too.
--unpacked
Only useful with --objects; print the object IDs that are not in packs.
--object-names
Only useful with --objects; print the names of the object IDs that are found. This is the default behavior. Note that the "name" of each object is ambiguous, and mostly intended as a hint for packing objects. In particular: no distinction is made between the names of tags, trees, and blobs; path names may be modified to remove newlines; and if an object would appear multiple times with different names, only one name is shown.
--no-object-names
Only useful with --objects; does not print the names of the object IDs that are found. This inverts --object-names. This flag allows the output to be more easily parsed by commands such as the section called “git-cat-file(1)”.
--filter=<filter-spec>

Only useful with one of the --objects*; omits objects (usually blobs) from the list of printed objects. The <filter-spec> may be one of the following:

The form --filter=blob:none omits all blobs.

The form --filter=blob:limit=<n>[kmg] omits blobs of size at least n bytes or units. n may be zero. The suffixes k, m, and g can be used to name units in KiB, MiB, or GiB. For example, blob:limit=1k is the same as blob:limit=1024.

The form --filter=object:type=(tag|commit|tree|blob) omits all objects which are not of the requested type.

The form --filter=sparse:oid=<blob-ish> uses a sparse-checkout specification contained in the blob (or blob-expression) <blob-ish> to omit blobs that would not be required for a sparse checkout on the requested refs.

The form --filter=tree:<depth> omits all blobs and trees whose depth from the root tree is >= <depth> (minimum depth if an object is located at multiple depths in the commits traversed). <depth>=0 will not include any trees or blobs unless included explicitly in the command-line (or standard input when --stdin is used). <depth>=1 will include only the tree and blobs which are referenced directly by a commit reachable from <commit> or an explicitly-given object. <depth>=2 is like <depth>=1 while also including trees and blobs one more level removed from an explicitly-given commit or tree.

Note that the form --filter=sparse:path=<path> that wants to read from an arbitrary path on the filesystem has been dropped for security reasons.

Multiple --filter= flags can be specified to combine filters. Only objects which are accepted by every filter are included.

The form --filter=combine:<filter1>+<filter2>+…<filterN> can also be used to combined several filters, but this is harder than just repeating the --filter flag and is usually not necessary. Filters are joined by + and individual filters are %-encoded (i.e. URL-encoded). Besides the + and % characters, the following characters are reserved and also must be encoded: ~!@#$^&*()[]{}\;",<>?'` as well as all characters with ASCII code <= 0x20, which includes space and newline.

Other arbitrary characters can also be encoded. For instance, combine:tree:3+blob:none and combine:tree%3A3+blob%3Anone are equivalent.

--no-filter
Turn off any previous --filter= argument.
--filter-provided-objects
Filter the list of explicitly provided objects, which would otherwise always be printed even if they did not match any of the filters. Only useful with --filter=.
--filter-print-omitted
Only useful with --filter=; prints a list of the objects omitted by the filter. Object IDs are prefixed with a ~ character.
--missing=<missing-action>

A debug option to help with future "partial clone" development. This option specifies how missing objects are handled.

The form --missing=error requests that rev-list stop with an error if a missing object is encountered. This is the default action.

The form --missing=allow-any will allow object traversal to continue if a missing object is encountered. Missing objects will silently be omitted from the results.

The form --missing=allow-promisor is like allow-any, but will only allow object traversal to continue for EXPECTED promisor missing objects. Unexpected missing objects will raise an error.

The form --missing=print is like allow-any, but will also print a list of the missing objects. Object IDs are prefixed with a ? character.

The form --missing=print-info is like print, but will also print additional information about the missing object inferred from its containing object. The information is all printed on the same line with the missing object ID in the form: ?<oid> [<token>=<value>].... The <token>=<value> pairs containing additional information are separated from each other by a SP. The value is encoded in a token specific fashion, but SP or LF contained in value are always expected to be represented in such a way that the resulting encoded value does not have either of these two problematic bytes. Each <token>=<value> may be one of the following:

  • The path=<path> shows the path of the missing object inferred from a containing object. A path containing SP or special characters is enclosed in double-quotes in the C style as needed.
  • The type=<type> shows the type of the missing object inferred from a containing object.

If some tips passed to the traversal are missing, they will be considered as missing too, and the traversal will ignore them. In case we cannot get their Object ID though, an error will be raised.

--exclude-promisor-objects
(For internal use only.) Prefilter object traversal at promisor boundary. This is used with partial clone. This is stronger than --missing=allow-promisor because it limits the traversal, rather than just silencing errors about missing objects.
--no-walk[=(sorted|unsorted)]
Only show the given commits, but do not traverse their ancestors. This has no effect if a range is specified. If the argument unsorted is given, the commits are shown in the order they were given on the command line. Otherwise (if sorted or no argument was given), the commits are shown in reverse chronological order by commit time. Cannot be combined with --graph.
--do-walk
Overrides a previous --no-walk.

Commit Formatting

Using these options, the section called “git-rev-list(1)” will act similar to the more specialized family of commit log tools: the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, and the section called “git-whatchanged(1)”

--pretty[=<format>] , --format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format> were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

--no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit, either explicit or implied by other options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.
--oneline
This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.
--encoding=<encoding>
Commit objects record the character encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output the original object verbatim.
--expand-tabs=<n> , --expand-tabs , --no-expand-tabs

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>) in the log message before showing it in the output. --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--show-signature
Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signature to gpg --verify and show the output.
--relative-date
Synonym for --date=relative.
--date=<format>

Only takes effect for dates shown in human-readable format, such as when using --pretty. log.date config variable sets a default value for the log command's --date option. By default, dates are shown in the original time zone (either committer's or author's). If -local is appended to the format (e.g., iso-local), the user's local time zone is used instead.

--date=relative shows dates relative to the current time, e.g. 2 hours ago. The -local option has no effect for --date=relative.

--date=local is an alias for --date=default-local.

--date=iso (or --date=iso8601) shows timestamps in a ISO 8601-like format. The differences to the strict ISO 8601 format are:

  • a space instead of the T date/time delimiter
  • a space between time and time zone
  • no colon between hours and minutes of the time zone

--date=iso-strict (or --date=iso8601-strict) shows timestamps in strict ISO 8601 format.

--date=rfc (or --date=rfc2822) shows timestamps in RFC 2822 format, often found in email messages.

--date=short shows only the date, but not the time, in YYYY-MM-DD format.

--date=raw shows the date as seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a space, and then the timezone as an offset from UTC (a + or - with four digits; the first two are hours, and the second two are minutes). I.e., as if the timestamp were formatted with strftime("%s %z")). Note that the -local option does not affect the seconds-since-epoch value (which is always measured in UTC), but does switch the accompanying timezone value.

--date=human shows the timezone if the timezone does not match the current time-zone, and doesn't print the whole date if that matches (ie skip printing year for dates that are "this year", but also skip the whole date itself if it's in the last few days and we can just say what weekday it was). For older dates the hour and minute is also omitted.

--date=unix shows the date as a Unix epoch timestamp (seconds since 1970). As with --raw, this is always in UTC and therefore -local has no effect.

--date=format:... feeds the format ... to your system strftime, except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally. Use --date=format:%c to show the date in your system locale's preferred format. See the strftime manual for a complete list of format placeholders. When using -local, the correct syntax is --date=format-local:....

--date=default is the default format, and is based on ctime(3) output. It shows a single line with three-letter day of the week, three-letter month, day-of-month, hour-minute-seconds in "HH:MM:SS" format, followed by 4-digit year, plus timezone information, unless the local time zone is used, e.g. Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000.

--header
Print the contents of the commit in raw-format; each record is separated with a NUL character.
--no-commit-header
Suppress the header line containing "commit" and the object ID printed before the specified format. This has no effect on the built-in formats; only custom formats are affected.
--commit-header
Overrides a previous --no-commit-header.
--parents
Print also the parents of the commit (in the form "commit parent…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--children
Print also the children of the commit (in the form "commit child…"). Also enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.
--timestamp
Print the raw commit timestamp.
--left-right

Mark which side of a symmetric difference a commit is reachable from. Commits from the left side are prefixed with < and those from the right with >. If combined with --boundary, those commits are prefixed with -.

For example, if you have this topology:

             y---b---b  branch B
            / \ /
           /   .
          /   / \
         o---x---a---a  branch A

you would get an output like this:

        $ git rev-list --left-right --boundary --pretty=oneline A...B

        >bbbbbbb... 3rd on b
        >bbbbbbb... 2nd on b
        <aaaaaaa... 3rd on a
        <aaaaaaa... 2nd on a
        -yyyyyyy... 1st on b
        -xxxxxxx... 1st on a
--graph

Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history on the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra lines to be printed in between commits, in order for the graph history to be drawn properly. Cannot be combined with --no-walk.

This enables parent rewriting, see History Simplification above.

This implies the --topo-order option by default, but the --date-order option may also be specified.

--show-linear-break[=<barrier>]
When --graph is not used, all history branches are flattened which can make it hard to see that the two consecutive commits do not belong to a linear branch. This option puts a barrier in between them in that case. If <barrier> is specified, it is the string that will be shown instead of the default one.
--count
Print a number stating how many commits would have been listed, and suppress all other output. When used together with --left-right, instead print the counts for left and right commits, separated by a tab. When used together with --cherry-mark, omit patch equivalent commits from these counts and print the count for equivalent commits separated by a tab.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the hashes of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

  • oneline

    <hash> <title-line>

    This is designed to be as compact as possible.

  • short

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    <title-line>
  • medium

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Date:   <author-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • full

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Commit: <committer>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • fuller

    commit <hash>
    Author:     <author>
    AuthorDate: <author-date>
    Commit:     <committer>
    CommitDate: <committer-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • reference

    <abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

    This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s, %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with any format: with format placeholders, its output is not affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

  • email

    From <hash> <date>
    From: <author>
    Date: <author-date>
    Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • mboxrd

    Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so they aren't confused as starting a new commit.

  • raw

    The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

  • format:<format-string>

    The format:<format-string> format allows you to specify which information you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format, with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n instead of \n.

    E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:

    The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
    The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

    The placeholders are:

    • Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

      %n
      newline
      %%
      a raw %
      %x00
      %x followed by two hexadecimal digits is replaced with a byte with the hexadecimal digits' value (we will call this "literal formatting code" in the rest of this document).
    • Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders:

      %Cred
      switch color to red
      %Cgreen
      switch color to green
      %Cblue
      switch color to blue
      %Creset
      reset color
      %C(…)
      color specification, as described under Values in the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-config(1)”. By default, colors are shown only when enabled for log output (by color.diff, color.ui, or --color, and respecting the auto settings of the former if we are going to a terminal). %C(auto,...) is accepted as a historical synonym for the default (e.g., %C(auto,red)). Specifying %C(always,...) will show the colors even when color is not otherwise enabled (though consider just using --color=always to enable color for the whole output, including this format and anything else git might color). auto alone (i.e. %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloring on the next placeholders until the color is switched again.
      %m
      left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark
      %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])
      switch line wrapping, like the -w option of the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
      %<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
      make the next placeholder take at least N column widths, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Optionally truncate (with ellipsis ..) at the left (ltrunc) ..ft, the middle (mtrunc) mi..le, or the end (trunc) rig.., if the output is longer than N columns. Note 1: that truncating only works correctly with N >= 2. Note 2: spaces around the N and M (see below) values are optional. Note 3: Emojis and other wide characters will take two display columns, which may over-run column boundaries. Note 4: decomposed character combining marks may be misplaced at padding boundaries.
      %<|( <M> )
      make the next placeholder take at least until Mth display column, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Use negative M values for column positions measured from the right hand edge of the terminal window.
      %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding spaces on the left
      %>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )
      similar to %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> ) respectively, except that if the next placeholder takes more spaces than given and there are spaces on its left, use those spaces
      %><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding both sides (i.e. the text is centered)
    • Placeholders that expand to information extracted from the commit:

      %H
      commit hash
      %h
      abbreviated commit hash
      %T
      tree hash
      %t
      abbreviated tree hash
      %P
      parent hashes
      %p
      abbreviated parent hashes
      %an
      author name
      %aN
      author name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ae
      author email
      %aE
      author email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %al
      author email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %aL
      author local-part (see %al) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ad
      author date (format respects --date= option)
      %aD
      author date, RFC2822 style
      %ar
      author date, relative
      %at
      author date, UNIX timestamp
      %ai
      author date, ISO 8601-like format
      %aI
      author date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %as
      author date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ah
      author date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %cn
      committer name
      %cN
      committer name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ce
      committer email
      %cE
      committer email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cl
      committer email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %cL
      committer local-part (see %cl) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cd
      committer date (format respects --date= option)
      %cD
      committer date, RFC2822 style
      %cr
      committer date, relative
      %ct
      committer date, UNIX timestamp
      %ci
      committer date, ISO 8601-like format
      %cI
      committer date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %cs
      committer date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ch
      committer date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %d
      ref names, like the --decorate option of the section called “git-log(1)”
      %D
      ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.
      %(decorate[:<options>])

      ref names with custom decorations. The decorate string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Option values may contain literal formatting codes. These must be used for commas (%x2C) and closing parentheses (%x29), due to their role in the option syntax.

      • prefix=<value>: Shown before the list of ref names. Defaults to " (".
      • suffix=<value>: Shown after the list of ref names. Defaults to ")".
      • separator=<value>: Shown between ref names. Defaults to ", ".
      • pointer=<value>: Shown between HEAD and the branch it points to, if any. Defaults to " -> ".
      • tag=<value>: Shown before tag names. Defaults to "tag: ".

      For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

      %(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

      %(describe[:<options>])

      human-readable name, like the section called “git-describe(1)”; empty string for undescribable commits. The describe string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Descriptions can be inconsistent when tags are added or removed at the same time.

      • tags[=<bool-value>]: Instead of only considering annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as well.
      • abbrev=<number>: Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary according to the number of objects in the repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object name, use <number> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a unique object name.
      • match=<pattern>: Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      • exclude=<pattern>: Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      %S
      ref name given on the command line by which the commit was reached (like git log --source), only works with git log
      %e
      encoding
      %s
      subject
      %f
      sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
      %b
      body
      %B
      raw body (unwrapped subject and body)
      %GG
      raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit
      %G?
      show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired, "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R" for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key) and "N" for no signature
      %GS
      show the name of the signer for a signed commit
      %GK
      show the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GF
      show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GP
      show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey was used to sign a signed commit
      %GT
      show the trust level for the key used to sign a signed commit
      %gD
      reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or refs/stash@{2 minutes ago}; the format follows the rules described for the -g option. The portion before the @ is the refname as given on the command line (so git log -g refs/heads/master would yield refs/heads/master@{0}).
      %gd
      shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the refname portion is shortened for human readability (so refs/heads/master becomes just master).
      %gn
      reflog identity name
      %gN
      reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ge
      reflog identity email
      %gE
      reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %gs
      reflog subject
      %(trailers[:<options>])

      display the trailers of the body as interpreted by the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”. The trailers string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. If any option is provided multiple times, the last occurrence wins.

      • key=<key>: only show trailers with specified <key>. Matching is done case-insensitively and trailing colon is optional. If option is given multiple times trailer lines matching any of the keys are shown. This option automatically enables the only option so that non-trailer lines in the trailer block are hidden. If that is not desired it can be disabled with only=false. E.g., %(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines with key Reviewed-by.
      • only[=<bool>]: select whether non-trailer lines from the trailer block should be included.
      • separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between trailer lines. Defaults to a line feed character. The string <sep> may contain the literal formatting codes described above. To use comma as separator one must use %x2C as it would otherwise be parsed as next option. E.g., %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C ) shows all trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by a comma and a space.
      • unfold[=<bool>]: make it behave as if interpret-trailer's --unfold option was given. E.g., %(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and shows all trailer lines.
      • keyonly[=<bool>]: only show the key part of the trailer.
      • valueonly[=<bool>]: only show the value part of the trailer.
      • key_value_separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between the key and value of each trailer. Defaults to ": ". Otherwise it shares the same semantics as separator=<sep> above.

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The values taken by --type=bool git-config[1], like yes and off, are all accepted. Giving a boolean option without =<value> is equivalent to giving it with =true.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

  • tformat:

    The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries. This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does. For example:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
    
    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973

    In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two are equivalent:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
    $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

EXAMPLES

  • Print the list of commits reachable from the current branch.

    git rev-list HEAD
  • Print the list of commits on this branch, but not present in the upstream branch.

    git rev-list @{upstream}..HEAD
  • Format commits with their author and commit message (see also the porcelain the section called “git-log(1)”).

    git rev-list --format=medium HEAD
  • Format commits along with their diffs (see also the porcelain the section called “git-log(1)”, which can do this in a single process).

    git rev-list HEAD |
    git diff-tree --stdin --format=medium -p
  • Print the list of commits on the current branch that touched any file in the Documentation directory.

    git rev-list HEAD -- Documentation/
  • Print the list of commits authored by you in the past year, on any branch, tag, or other ref.

    git rev-list --author=you@example.com --since=1.year.ago --all
  • Print the list of objects reachable from the current branch (i.e., all commits and the blobs and trees they contain).

    git rev-list --objects HEAD
  • Compare the disk size of all reachable objects, versus those reachable from reflogs, versus the total packed size. This can tell you whether running git repack -ad might reduce the repository size (by dropping unreachable objects), and whether expiring reflogs might help.

    # reachable objects
    git rev-list --disk-usage --objects --all
    # plus reflogs
    git rev-list --disk-usage --objects --all --reflog
    # total disk size used
    du -c .git/objects/pack/*.pack .git/objects/??/*
    # alternative to du: add up "size" and "size-pack" fields
    git count-objects -v
  • Report the disk size of each branch, not including objects used by the current branch. This can find outliers that are contributing to a bloated repository size (e.g., because somebody accidentally committed large build artifacts).

    git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' |
    while read branch
    do
            size=$(git rev-list --disk-usage --objects HEAD..$branch)
            echo "$size $branch"
    done |
    sort -n
  • Compare the on-disk size of branches in one group of refs, excluding another. If you co-mingle objects from multiple remotes in a single repository, this can show which remotes are contributing to the repository size (taking the size of origin as a baseline).

    git rev-list --disk-usage --objects --remotes=$suspect --not --remotes=origin

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-rev-parse(1)

NAME

git-rev-parse - Pick out and massage parameters

SYNOPSIS

git rev-parse [<options>] <arg>…

DESCRIPTION

Many Git porcelainish commands take a mixture of flags (i.e. parameters that begin with a dash -) and parameters meant for the underlying git rev-list command they use internally and flags and parameters for the other commands they use downstream of git rev-list. The primary purpose of this command is to allow calling programs to distinguish between them. There are a few other operation modes that have nothing to do with the above "help parse command line options".

Unless otherwise specified, most of the options and operation modes require you to run this command inside a git repository or a working tree that is under the control of a git repository, and will give you a fatal error otherwise.

OPTIONS

Operation Modes

Each of these options must appear first on the command line.

--parseopt
Use git rev-parse in option parsing mode (see PARSEOPT section below). The command in this mode can be used outside a repository or a working tree controlled by a repository.
--sq-quote
Use git rev-parse in shell quoting mode (see SQ-QUOTE section below). In contrast to the --sq option below, this mode only does quoting. Nothing else is done to command input. The command in this mode can be used outside a repository or a working tree controlled by a repository.

Options for --parseopt

--keep-dashdash
Only meaningful in --parseopt mode. Tells the option parser to echo out the first -- met instead of skipping it.
--stop-at-non-option
Only meaningful in --parseopt mode. Lets the option parser stop at the first non-option argument. This can be used to parse sub-commands that take options themselves.
--stuck-long
Only meaningful in --parseopt mode. Output the options in their long form if available, and with their arguments stuck.

Options for Filtering

--revs-only
Do not output flags and parameters not meant for git rev-list command.
--no-revs
Do not output flags and parameters meant for git rev-list command.
--flags
Do not output non-flag parameters.
--no-flags
Do not output flag parameters.

Options for Output

--default <arg>
If there is no parameter given by the user, use <arg> instead.
--prefix <arg>

Behave as if git rev-parse was invoked from the <arg> subdirectory of the working tree. Any relative filenames are resolved as if they are prefixed by <arg> and will be printed in that form.

This can be used to convert arguments to a command run in a subdirectory so that they can still be used after moving to the top-level of the repository. For example:

prefix=$(git rev-parse --show-prefix)
cd "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"
# rev-parse provides the -- needed for 'set'
eval "set $(git rev-parse --sq --prefix "$prefix" -- "$@")"
--verify

Verify that exactly one parameter is provided, and that it can be turned into a raw 20-byte SHA-1 that can be used to access the object database. If so, emit it to the standard output; otherwise, error out.

If you want to make sure that the output actually names an object in your object database and/or can be used as a specific type of object you require, you can add the ^{type} peeling operator to the parameter. For example, git rev-parse "$VAR^{commit}" will make sure $VAR names an existing object that is a commit-ish (i.e. a commit, or an annotated tag that points at a commit). To make sure that $VAR names an existing object of any type, git rev-parse "$VAR^{object}" can be used.

Note that if you are verifying a name from an untrusted source, it is wise to use --end-of-options so that the name argument is not mistaken for another option.

-q , --quiet
Only meaningful in --verify mode. Do not output an error message if the first argument is not a valid object name; instead exit with non-zero status silently. SHA-1s for valid object names are printed to stdout on success.
--sq
Usually the output is made one line per flag and parameter. This option makes output a single line, properly quoted for consumption by shell. Useful when you expect your parameter to contain whitespaces and newlines (e.g. when using pickaxe -S with git diff-*). In contrast to the --sq-quote option, the command input is still interpreted as usual.
--short[=<length>]
Same as --verify but shortens the object name to a unique prefix with at least length characters. The minimum length is 4, the default is the effective value of the core.abbrev configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--not
When showing object names, prefix them with ^ and strip ^ prefix from the object names that already have one.
--abbrev-ref[=(strict|loose)]
A non-ambiguous short name of the objects name. The option core.warnAmbiguousRefs is used to select the strict abbreviation mode.
--symbolic
Usually the object names are output in SHA-1 form (with possible ^ prefix); this option makes them output in a form as close to the original input as possible.
--symbolic-full-name
This is similar to --symbolic, but it omits input that are not refs (i.e. branch or tag names; or more explicitly disambiguating "heads/master" form, when you want to name the "master" branch when there is an unfortunately named tag "master"), and shows them as full refnames (e.g. "refs/heads/master").
--output-object-format=(sha1|sha256|storage)

Allow oids to be input from any object format that the current repository supports.

Specifying "sha1" translates if necessary and returns a sha1 oid.
Specifying "sha256" translates if necessary and returns a sha256 oid.
Specifying "storage" translates if necessary and returns an oid in
encoded in the storage hash algorithm.

Options for Objects

--all
Show all refs found in refs/.
--branches[=<pattern>] , --tags[=<pattern>] , --remotes[=<pattern>]

Show all branches, tags, or remote-tracking branches, respectively (i.e., refs found in refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes, respectively).

If a pattern is given, only refs matching the given shell glob are shown. If the pattern does not contain a globbing character (?, *, or [), it is turned into a prefix match by appending /*.

--glob=<pattern>
Show all refs matching the shell glob pattern pattern. If the pattern does not start with refs/, this is automatically prepended. If the pattern does not contain a globbing character (?, *, or [), it is turned into a prefix match by appending /*.
--exclude=<glob-pattern>

Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=(fetch|receive|uploadpack)
Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch, git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with transfer.hideRefs (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This option affects the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared after processing them.
--disambiguate=<prefix>
Show every object whose name begins with the given prefix. The <prefix> must be at least 4 hexadecimal digits long to avoid listing each and every object in the repository by mistake.

Options for Files

--local-env-vars
List the GIT_* environment variables that are local to the repository (e.g. GIT_DIR or GIT_WORK_TREE, but not GIT_EDITOR). Only the names of the variables are listed, not their value, even if they are set.
--path-format=(absolute|relative)

Controls the behavior of certain other options. If specified as absolute, the paths printed by those options will be absolute and canonical. If specified as relative, the paths will be relative to the current working directory if that is possible. The default is option specific.

This option may be specified multiple times and affects only the arguments that follow it on the command line, either to the end of the command line or the next instance of this option.

The following options are modified by --path-format:

--git-dir

Show $GIT_DIR if defined. Otherwise show the path to the .git directory. The path shown, when relative, is relative to the current working directory.

If $GIT_DIR is not defined and the current directory is not detected to lie in a Git repository or work tree print a message to stderr and exit with nonzero status.

--git-common-dir
Show $GIT_COMMON_DIR if defined, else $GIT_DIR.
--resolve-git-dir <path>
Check if <path> is a valid repository or a gitfile that points at a valid repository, and print the location of the repository. If <path> is a gitfile then the resolved path to the real repository is printed.
--git-path <path>
Resolve "$GIT_DIR/<path>" and takes other path relocation variables such as $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY, $GIT_INDEX_FILE… into account. For example, if $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY is set to /foo/bar then "git rev-parse --git-path objects/abc" returns /foo/bar/abc.
--show-toplevel
Show the (by default, absolute) path of the top-level directory of the working tree. If there is no working tree, report an error.
--show-superproject-working-tree
Show the absolute path of the root of the superproject's working tree (if exists) that uses the current repository as its submodule. Outputs nothing if the current repository is not used as a submodule by any project.
--shared-index-path
Show the path to the shared index file in split index mode, or empty if not in split-index mode.

The following options are unaffected by --path-format:

--absolute-git-dir
Like --git-dir, but its output is always the canonicalized absolute path.
--is-inside-git-dir
When the current working directory is below the repository directory print "true", otherwise "false".
--is-inside-work-tree
When the current working directory is inside the work tree of the repository print "true", otherwise "false".
--is-bare-repository
When the repository is bare print "true", otherwise "false".
--is-shallow-repository
When the repository is shallow print "true", otherwise "false".
--show-cdup
When the command is invoked from a subdirectory, show the path of the top-level directory relative to the current directory (typically a sequence of "../", or an empty string).
--show-prefix
When the command is invoked from a subdirectory, show the path of the current directory relative to the top-level directory.
--show-object-format[=(storage|input|output)]
Show the object format (hash algorithm) used for the repository for storage inside the .git directory, input, or output. For input, multiple algorithms may be printed, space-separated. If not specified, the default is "storage".
--show-ref-format
Show the reference storage format used for the repository.

Other Options

--since=<datestring> , --after=<datestring>
Parse the date string, and output the corresponding --max-age= parameter for git rev-list.
--until=<datestring> , --before=<datestring>
Parse the date string, and output the corresponding --min-age= parameter for git rev-list.
<arg>…
Flags and parameters to be parsed.

SPECIFYING REVISIONS

A revision parameter <rev> typically, but not necessarily, names a commit object. It uses what is called an extended SHA-1 syntax. Here are various ways to spell object names. The ones listed near the end of this list name trees and blobs contained in a commit.

Note

This document shows the "raw" syntax as seen by git. The shell and other UIs might require additional quoting to protect special characters and to avoid word splitting.

<sha1>, e.g. dae86e1950b1277e545cee180551750029cfe735, dae86e
The full SHA-1 object name (40-byte hexadecimal string), or a leading substring that is unique within the repository. E.g. dae86e1950b1277e545cee180551750029cfe735 and dae86e both name the same commit object if there is no other object in your repository whose object name starts with dae86e.
<describeOutput>, e.g. v1.7.4.2-679-g3bee7fb
Output from git describe; i.e. a closest tag, optionally followed by a dash and a number of commits, followed by a dash, a g, and an abbreviated object name.
<refname>, e.g. master, heads/master, refs/heads/master

A symbolic ref name. E.g. master typically means the commit object referenced by refs/heads/master. If you happen to have both heads/master and tags/master, you can explicitly say heads/master to tell Git which one you mean. When ambiguous, a <refname> is disambiguated by taking the first match in the following rules:

  1. If $GIT_DIR/<refname> exists, that is what you mean (this is usually useful only for HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD, REBASE_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, BISECT_HEAD and AUTO_MERGE);
  2. otherwise, refs/<refname> if it exists;
  3. otherwise, refs/tags/<refname> if it exists;
  4. otherwise, refs/heads/<refname> if it exists;
  5. otherwise, refs/remotes/<refname> if it exists;
  6. otherwise, refs/remotes/<refname>/HEAD if it exists.
HEAD
names the commit on which you based the changes in the working tree.
FETCH_HEAD
records the branch which you fetched from a remote repository with your last git fetch invocation.
ORIG_HEAD
is created by commands that move your HEAD in a drastic way (git am, git merge, git rebase, git reset), to record the position of the HEAD before their operation, so that you can easily change the tip of the branch back to the state before you ran them.
MERGE_HEAD
records the commit(s) which you are merging into your branch when you run git merge.
REBASE_HEAD
during a rebase, records the commit at which the operation is currently stopped, either because of conflicts or an edit command in an interactive rebase.
REVERT_HEAD
records the commit which you are reverting when you run git revert.
CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
records the commit which you are cherry-picking when you run git cherry-pick.
BISECT_HEAD
records the current commit to be tested when you run git bisect --no-checkout.
AUTO_MERGE
records a tree object corresponding to the state the ort merge strategy wrote to the working tree when a merge operation resulted in conflicts.

Note that any of the refs/* cases above may come either from the $GIT_DIR/refs directory or from the $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file. While the ref name encoding is unspecified, UTF-8 is preferred as some output processing may assume ref names in UTF-8.

@
@ alone is a shortcut for HEAD.
[<refname>]@{<date>}, e.g. master@{yesterday}, HEAD@{5 minutes ago}
A ref followed by the suffix @ with a date specification enclosed in a brace pair (e.g. {yesterday}, {1 month 2 weeks 3 days 1 hour 1 second ago} or {1979-02-26 18:30:00}) specifies the value of the ref at a prior point in time. This suffix may only be used immediately following a ref name and the ref must have an existing log ($GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>). Note that this looks up the state of your local ref at a given time; e.g., what was in your local master branch last week. If you want to look at commits made during certain times, see --since and --until.
<refname>@{<n>}, e.g. master@{1}
A ref followed by the suffix @ with an ordinal specification enclosed in a brace pair (e.g. {1}, {15}) specifies the n-th prior value of that ref. For example master@{1} is the immediate prior value of master while master@{5} is the 5th prior value of master. This suffix may only be used immediately following a ref name and the ref must have an existing log ($GIT_DIR/logs/<refname>).
@{<n>}, e.g. @{1}
You can use the @ construct with an empty ref part to get at a reflog entry of the current branch. For example, if you are on branch blabla then @{1} means the same as blabla@{1}.
@{-<n>}, e.g. @{-1}
The construct @{-<n>} means the <n>th branch/commit checked out before the current one.
[<branchname>]@{upstream}, e.g. master@{upstream}, @{u}
A branch B may be set up to build on top of a branch X (configured with branch.<name>.merge) at a remote R (configured with the branch X taken from remote R, typically found at refs/remotes/R/X.
[<branchname>]@{push}, e.g. master@{push}, @{push}

The suffix @{push} reports the branch "where we would push to" if git push were run while branchname was checked out (or the current HEAD if no branchname is specified). Like for @{upstream}, we report the remote-tracking branch that corresponds to that branch at the remote.

Here's an example to make it more clear:

$ git config push.default current
$ git config remote.pushdefault myfork
$ git switch -c mybranch origin/master

$ git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name @{upstream}
refs/remotes/origin/master

$ git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name @{push}
refs/remotes/myfork/mybranch

Note in the example that we set up a triangular workflow, where we pull from one location and push to another. In a non-triangular workflow, @{push} is the same as @{upstream}, and there is no need for it.

This suffix is also accepted when spelled in uppercase, and means the same thing no matter the case.

<rev>^[<n>], e.g. HEAD^, v1.5.1^0
A suffix ^ to a revision parameter means the first parent of that commit object. ^<n> means the <n>th parent (i.e. <rev>^ is equivalent to <rev>^1). As a special rule, <rev>^0 means the commit itself and is used when <rev> is the object name of a tag object that refers to a commit object.
<rev>~[<n>], e.g. HEAD~, master~3
A suffix ~ to a revision parameter means the first parent of that commit object. A suffix ~<n> to a revision parameter means the commit object that is the <n>th generation ancestor of the named commit object, following only the first parents. I.e. <rev>~3 is equivalent to <rev>^^^ which is equivalent to <rev>^1^1^1. See below for an illustration of the usage of this form.
<rev>^{<type>}, e.g. v0.99.8^{commit}

A suffix ^ followed by an object type name enclosed in brace pair means dereference the object at <rev> recursively until an object of type <type> is found or the object cannot be dereferenced anymore (in which case, barf). For example, if <rev> is a commit-ish, <rev>^{commit} describes the corresponding commit object. Similarly, if <rev> is a tree-ish, <rev>^{tree} describes the corresponding tree object. <rev>^0 is a short-hand for <rev>^{commit}.

<rev>^{object} can be used to make sure <rev> names an object that exists, without requiring <rev> to be a tag, and without dereferencing <rev>; because a tag is already an object, it does not have to be dereferenced even once to get to an object.

<rev>^{tag} can be used to ensure that <rev> identifies an existing tag object.

<rev>^{}, e.g. v0.99.8^{}
A suffix ^ followed by an empty brace pair means the object could be a tag, and dereference the tag recursively until a non-tag object is found.
<rev>^{/<text>}, e.g. HEAD^{/fix nasty bug}
A suffix ^ to a revision parameter, followed by a brace pair that contains a text led by a slash, is the same as the :/fix nasty bug syntax below except that it returns the youngest matching commit which is reachable from the <rev> before ^.
:/<text>, e.g. :/fix nasty bug
A colon, followed by a slash, followed by a text, names a commit whose commit message matches the specified regular expression. This name returns the youngest matching commit which is reachable from any ref, including HEAD. The regular expression can match any part of the commit message. To match messages starting with a string, one can use e.g. :/^foo. The special sequence :/! is reserved for modifiers to what is matched. :/!-foo performs a negative match, while :/!!foo matches a literal ! character, followed by foo. Any other sequence beginning with :/! is reserved for now. Depending on the given text, the shell's word splitting rules might require additional quoting.
<rev>:<path>, e.g. HEAD:README, master:./README
A suffix : followed by a path names the blob or tree at the given path in the tree-ish object named by the part before the colon. A path starting with ./ or ../ is relative to the current working directory. The given path will be converted to be relative to the working tree's root directory. This is most useful to address a blob or tree from a commit or tree that has the same tree structure as the working tree.
:[<n>:]<path>, e.g. :0:README, :README
A colon, optionally followed by a stage number (0 to 3) and a colon, followed by a path, names a blob object in the index at the given path. A missing stage number (and the colon that follows it) names a stage 0 entry. During a merge, stage 1 is the common ancestor, stage 2 is the target branch's version (typically the current branch), and stage 3 is the version from the branch which is being merged.

Here is an illustration, by Jon Loeliger. Both commit nodes B and C are parents of commit node A. Parent commits are ordered left-to-right.

G   H   I   J
 \ /     \ /
  D   E   F
   \  |  / \
    \ | /   |
     \|/    |
      B     C
       \   /
        \ /
         A
A =      = A^0
B = A^   = A^1     = A~1
C =      = A^2
D = A^^  = A^1^1   = A~2
E = B^2  = A^^2
F = B^3  = A^^3
G = A^^^ = A^1^1^1 = A~3
H = D^2  = B^^2    = A^^^2  = A~2^2
I = F^   = B^3^    = A^^3^
J = F^2  = B^3^2   = A^^3^2

SPECIFYING RANGES

History traversing commands such as git log operate on a set of commits, not just a single commit.

For these commands, specifying a single revision, using the notation described in the previous section, means the set of commits reachable from the given commit.

Specifying several revisions means the set of commits reachable from any of the given commits.

A commit's reachable set is the commit itself and the commits in its ancestry chain.

There are several notations to specify a set of connected commits (called a "revision range"), illustrated below.

Commit Exclusions

^<rev> (caret) Notation
To exclude commits reachable from a commit, a prefix ^ notation is used. E.g. ^r1 r2 means commits reachable from r2 but exclude the ones reachable from r1 (i.e. r1 and its ancestors).

Dotted Range Notations

The .. (two-dot) Range Notation
The ^r1 r2 set operation appears so often that there is a shorthand for it. When you have two commits r1 and r2 (named according to the syntax explained in SPECIFYING REVISIONS above), you can ask for commits that are reachable from r2 excluding those that are reachable from r1 by ^r1 r2 and it can be written as r1..r2.
The ... (three-dot) Symmetric Difference Notation
A similar notation r1...r2 is called symmetric difference of r1 and r2 and is defined as r1 r2 --not $(git merge-base --all r1 r2). It is the set of commits that are reachable from either one of r1 (left side) or r2 (right side) but not from both.

In these two shorthand notations, you can omit one end and let it default to HEAD. For example, origin.. is a shorthand for origin..HEAD and asks "What did I do since I forked from the origin branch?" Similarly, ..origin is a shorthand for HEAD..origin and asks "What did the origin do since I forked from them?" Note that .. would mean HEAD..HEAD which is an empty range that is both reachable and unreachable from HEAD.

Commands that are specifically designed to take two distinct ranges (e.g. "git range-diff R1 R2" to compare two ranges) do exist, but they are exceptions. Unless otherwise noted, all "git" commands that operate on a set of commits work on a single revision range. In other words, writing two "two-dot range notation" next to each other, e.g.

$ git log A..B C..D

does not specify two revision ranges for most commands. Instead it will name a single connected set of commits, i.e. those that are reachable from either B or D but are reachable from neither A or C. In a linear history like this:

---A---B---o---o---C---D

because A and B are reachable from C, the revision range specified by these two dotted ranges is a single commit D.

Other <rev>^ Parent Shorthand Notations

Three other shorthands exist, particularly useful for merge commits, for naming a set that is formed by a commit and its parent commits.

The r1^@ notation means all parents of r1.

The r1^! notation includes commit r1 but excludes all of its parents. By itself, this notation denotes the single commit r1.

The <rev>^-[<n>] notation includes <rev> but excludes the <n>th parent (i.e. a shorthand for <rev>^<n>..<rev>), with <n> = 1 if not given. This is typically useful for merge commits where you can just pass <commit>^- to get all the commits in the branch that was merged in merge commit <commit> (including <commit> itself).

While <rev>^<n> was about specifying a single commit parent, these three notations also consider its parents. For example you can say HEAD^2^@, however you cannot say HEAD^@^2.

Revision Range Summary

<rev>
Include commits that are reachable from <rev> (i.e. <rev> and its ancestors).
^<rev>
Exclude commits that are reachable from <rev> (i.e. <rev> and its ancestors).
<rev1>..<rev2>
Include commits that are reachable from <rev2> but exclude those that are reachable from <rev1>. When either <rev1> or <rev2> is omitted, it defaults to HEAD.
<rev1>...<rev2>
Include commits that are reachable from either <rev1> or <rev2> but exclude those that are reachable from both. When either <rev1> or <rev2> is omitted, it defaults to HEAD.
<rev>^@, e.g. HEAD^@
A suffix ^ followed by an at sign is the same as listing all parents of <rev> (meaning, include anything reachable from its parents, but not the commit itself).
<rev>^!, e.g. HEAD^!
A suffix ^ followed by an exclamation mark is the same as giving commit <rev> and all its parents prefixed with ^ to exclude them (and their ancestors).
<rev>^-<n>, e.g. HEAD^-, HEAD^-2
Equivalent to <rev>^<n>..<rev>, with <n> = 1 if not given.

Here are a handful of examples using the Loeliger illustration above, with each step in the notation's expansion and selection carefully spelt out:

   Args   Expanded arguments    Selected commits
   D                            G H D
   D F                          G H I J D F
   ^G D                         H D
   ^D B                         E I J F B
   ^D B C                       E I J F B C
   C                            I J F C
   B..C   = ^B C                C
   B...C  = B ^F C              G H D E B C
   B^-    = B^..B
          = ^B^1 B              E I J F B
   C^@    = C^1
          = F                   I J F
   B^@    = B^1 B^2 B^3
          = D E F               D G H E F I J
   C^!    = C ^C^@
          = C ^C^1
          = C ^F                C
   B^!    = B ^B^@
          = B ^B^1 ^B^2 ^B^3
          = B ^D ^E ^F          B
   F^! D  = F ^I ^J D           G H D F

PARSEOPT

In --parseopt mode, git rev-parse helps massaging options to bring to shell scripts the same facilities C builtins have. It works as an option normalizer (e.g. splits single switches aggregate values), a bit like getopt(1) does.

It takes on the standard input the specification of the options to parse and understand, and echoes on the standard output a string suitable for sh(1) eval to replace the arguments with normalized ones. In case of error, it outputs usage on the standard error stream, and exits with code 129.

Note: Make sure you quote the result when passing it to eval. See below for an example.

Input Format

git rev-parse --parseopt input format is fully text based. It has two parts, separated by a line that contains only --. The lines before the separator (should be one or more) are used for the usage. The lines after the separator describe the options.

Each line of options has this format:

<opt-spec><flags>*<arg-hint>? SP+ help LF
<opt-spec>
its format is the short option character, then the long option name separated by a comma. Both parts are not required, though at least one is necessary. May not contain any of the <flags> characters. h,help, dry-run and f are examples of correct <opt-spec>.
<flags>

<flags> are of *, =, ? or !.

  • Use = if the option takes an argument.
  • Use ? to mean that the option takes an optional argument. You probably want to use the --stuck-long mode to be able to unambiguously parse the optional argument.
  • Use * to mean that this option should not be listed in the usage generated for the -h argument. It's shown for --help-all as documented in the section called “gitcli(7)”.
  • Use ! to not make the corresponding negated long option available.
<arg-hint>
<arg-hint>, if specified, is used as a name of the argument in the help output, for options that take arguments. <arg-hint> is terminated by the first whitespace. It is customary to use a dash to separate words in a multi-word argument hint.

The remainder of the line, after stripping the spaces, is used as the help associated with the option.

Blank lines are ignored, and lines that don't match this specification are used as option group headers (start the line with a space to create such lines on purpose).

Example

OPTS_SPEC="\
some-command [<options>] <args>...

some-command does foo and bar!
--
h,help!   show the help

foo       some nifty option --foo
bar=      some cool option --bar with an argument
baz=arg   another cool option --baz with a named argument
qux?path  qux may take a path argument but has meaning by itself

  An option group Header
C?        option C with an optional argument"

eval "$(echo "$OPTS_SPEC" | git rev-parse --parseopt -- "$@" || echo exit $?)"

Usage text

When "$@" is -h or --help in the above example, the following usage text would be shown:

usage: some-command [<options>] <args>...

    some-command does foo and bar!

    -h, --help            show the help
    --[no-]foo            some nifty option --foo
    --[no-]bar ...        some cool option --bar with an argument
    --[no-]baz <arg>      another cool option --baz with a named argument
    --[no-]qux[=<path>]   qux may take a path argument but has meaning by itself

An option group Header
    -C[...]               option C with an optional argument

SQ-QUOTE

In --sq-quote mode, git rev-parse echoes on the standard output a single line suitable for sh(1) eval. This line is made by normalizing the arguments following --sq-quote. Nothing other than quoting the arguments is done.

If you want command input to still be interpreted as usual by git rev-parse before the output is shell quoted, see the --sq option.

Example

$ cat >your-git-script.sh <<\EOF
#!/bin/sh
args=$(git rev-parse --sq-quote "$@")   # quote user-supplied arguments
command="git frotz -n24 $args"          # and use it inside a handcrafted
                                        # command line
eval "$command"
EOF

$ sh your-git-script.sh "a b'c"

EXAMPLES

  • Print the object name of the current commit:

    $ git rev-parse --verify HEAD
  • Print the commit object name from the revision in the $REV shell variable:

    $ git rev-parse --verify --end-of-options $REV^{commit}

    This will error out if $REV is empty or not a valid revision.

  • Similar to above:

    $ git rev-parse --default master --verify --end-of-options $REV

    but if $REV is empty, the commit object name from master will be printed.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-revert(1)

NAME

git-revert - Revert some existing commits

SYNOPSIS

git revert [--[no-]edit] [-n] [-m <parent-number>] [-s] [-S[<keyid>]] <commit>…
git revert (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit)

DESCRIPTION

Given one or more existing commits, revert the changes that the related patches introduce, and record some new commits that record them. This requires your working tree to be clean (no modifications from the HEAD commit).

Note: git revert is used to record some new commits to reverse the effect of some earlier commits (often only a faulty one). If you want to throw away all uncommitted changes in your working directory, you should see the section called “git-reset(1)”, particularly the --hard option. If you want to extract specific files as they were in another commit, you should see the section called “git-restore(1)”, specifically the --source option. Take care with these alternatives as both will discard uncommitted changes in your working directory.

See "Reset, restore and revert" in the section called “git(1)” for the differences between the three commands.

OPTIONS

<commit>…
Commits to revert. For a more complete list of ways to spell commit names, see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”. Sets of commits can also be given but no traversal is done by default, see the section called “git-rev-list(1)” and its --no-walk option.
-e , --edit
With this option, git revert will let you edit the commit message prior to committing the revert. This is the default if you run the command from a terminal.
-m parent-number , --mainline parent-number

Usually you cannot revert a merge because you do not know which side of the merge should be considered the mainline. This option specifies the parent number (starting from 1) of the mainline and allows revert to reverse the change relative to the specified parent.

Reverting a merge commit declares that you will never want the tree changes brought in by the merge. As a result, later merges will only bring in tree changes introduced by commits that are not ancestors of the previously reverted merge. This may or may not be what you want.

See the revert-a-faulty-merge How-To for more details.

--no-edit
With this option, git revert will not start the commit message editor.
--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines how the commit message will be cleaned up before being passed on to the commit machinery. See the section called “git-commit(1)” for more details. In particular, if the <mode> is given a value of scissors, scissors will be appended to MERGE_MSG before being passed on in the case of a conflict.
-n , --no-commit

Usually the command automatically creates some commits with commit log messages stating which commits were reverted. This flag applies the changes necessary to revert the named commits to your working tree and the index, but does not make the commits. In addition, when this option is used, your index does not have to match the HEAD commit. The revert is done against the beginning state of your index.

This is useful when reverting more than one commits' effect to your index in a row.

-S[<keyid>] , --gpg-sign[=<keyid>] , --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.
-s , --signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer at the end of the commit message. See the signoff option in the section called “git-commit(1)” for more information.
--strategy=<strategy>
Use the given merge strategy. Should only be used once. See the MERGE STRATEGIES section in the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
-X<option> , --strategy-option=<option>
Pass the merge strategy-specific option through to the merge strategy. See the section called “git-merge(1)” for details.
--rerere-autoupdate , --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to also update the index with the result of resolution. --no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what rerere did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the result to the index with a separate git add.
--reference
Instead of starting the body of the log message with "This reverts <full-object-name-of-the-commit-being-reverted>.", refer to the commit using "--pretty=reference" format (cf. the section called “git-log(1)”). The revert.reference configuration variable can be used to enable this option by default.

SEQUENCER SUBCOMMANDS

--continue
Continue the operation in progress using the information in .git/sequencer. Can be used to continue after resolving conflicts in a failed cherry-pick or revert.
--skip
Skip the current commit and continue with the rest of the sequence.
--quit
Forget about the current operation in progress. Can be used to clear the sequencer state after a failed cherry-pick or revert.
--abort
Cancel the operation and return to the pre-sequence state.

EXAMPLES

git revert HEAD~3
Revert the changes specified by the fourth last commit in HEAD and create a new commit with the reverted changes.
git revert -n master~5..master~2
Revert the changes done by commits from the fifth last commit in master (included) to the third last commit in master (included), but do not create any commit with the reverted changes. The revert only modifies the working tree and the index.

DISCUSSION

While git creates a basic commit message automatically, it is strongly recommended to explain why the original commit is being reverted. In addition, repeatedly reverting reverts will result in increasingly unwieldy subject lines, for example Reapply "Reapply "<original-subject>"". Please consider rewording these to be shorter and more unique.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

revert.reference
Setting this variable to true makes git revert behave as if the --reference option is given.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-rm(1)

NAME

git-rm - Remove files from the working tree and from the index

SYNOPSIS

git rm [-f | --force] [-n] [-r] [--cached] [--ignore-unmatch]
       [--quiet] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
       [--] [<pathspec>]

DESCRIPTION

Remove files matching pathspec from the index, or from the working tree and the index. git rm will not remove a file from just your working directory. (There is no option to remove a file only from the working tree and yet keep it in the index; use /bin/rm if you want to do that.) The files being removed have to be identical to the tip of the branch, and no updates to their contents can be staged in the index, though that default behavior can be overridden with the -f option. When --cached is given, the staged content has to match either the tip of the branch or the file on disk, allowing the file to be removed from just the index. When sparse-checkouts are in use (see the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)”), git rm will only remove paths within the sparse-checkout patterns.

OPTIONS

<pathspec>...

Files to remove. A leading directory name (e.g. dir to remove dir/file1 and dir/file2) can be given to remove all files in the directory, and recursively all sub-directories, but this requires the -r option to be explicitly given.

The command removes only the paths that are known to Git.

File globbing matches across directory boundaries. Thus, given two directories d and d2, there is a difference between using git rm 'd*' and git rm 'd/*', as the former will also remove all of directory d2.

For more details, see the <pathspec> entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

-f , --force
Override the up-to-date check.
-n , --dry-run
Don't actually remove any file(s). Instead, just show if they exist in the index and would otherwise be removed by the command.
-r
Allow recursive removal when a leading directory name is given.
--
This option can be used to separate command-line options from the list of files, (useful when filenames might be mistaken for command-line options).
--cached
Use this option to unstage and remove paths only from the index. Working tree files, whether modified or not, will be left alone.
--ignore-unmatch
Exit with a zero status even if no files matched.
--sparse
Allow updating index entries outside of the sparse-checkout cone. Normally, git rm refuses to update index entries whose paths do not fit within the sparse-checkout cone. See the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more.
-q , --quiet
git rm normally outputs one line (in the form of an rm command) for each file removed. This option suppresses that output.
--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.
--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).

REMOVING FILES THAT HAVE DISAPPEARED FROM THE FILESYSTEM

There is no option for git rm to remove from the index only the paths that have disappeared from the filesystem. However, depending on the use case, there are several ways that can be done.

Using git commit -a

If you intend that your next commit should record all modifications of tracked files in the working tree and record all removals of files that have been removed from the working tree with rm (as opposed to git rm), use git commit -a, as it will automatically notice and record all removals. You can also have a similar effect without committing by using git add -u.

Using git add -A

When accepting a new code drop for a vendor branch, you probably want to record both the removal of paths and additions of new paths as well as modifications of existing paths.

Typically you would first remove all tracked files from the working tree using this command:

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm -f

and then untar the new code in the working tree. Alternately you could rsync the changes into the working tree.

After that, the easiest way to record all removals, additions, and modifications in the working tree is:

git add -A

See the section called “git-add(1)”.

Other ways

If all you really want to do is to remove from the index the files that are no longer present in the working tree (perhaps because your working tree is dirty so that you cannot use git commit -a), use the following command:

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=D -z | xargs -0 git rm --cached

SUBMODULES

Only submodules using a gitfile (which means they were cloned with a Git version 1.7.8 or newer) will be removed from the work tree, as their repository lives inside the .git directory of the superproject. If a submodule (or one of those nested inside it) still uses a .git directory, git rm moves the submodules git directory into the superprojects git directory to protect the submodule's history. If it exists the submodule.<name> section in the the section called “gitmodules(5)” file will also be removed and that file will be staged (unless --cached or -n are used).

A submodule is considered up to date when the HEAD is the same as recorded in the index, no tracked files are modified and no untracked files that aren't ignored are present in the submodule's work tree. Ignored files are deemed expendable and won't stop a submodule's work tree from being removed.

If you only want to remove the local checkout of a submodule from your work tree without committing the removal, use the section called “git-submodule(1)” deinit instead. Also see the section called “gitsubmodules(7)” for details on submodule removal.

EXAMPLES

git rm Documentation/\*.txt

Removes all *.txt files from the index that are under the Documentation directory and any of its subdirectories.

Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell in this example; this lets Git, and not the shell, expand the pathnames of files and subdirectories under the Documentation/ directory.

git rm -f git-*.sh
Because this example lets the shell expand the asterisk (i.e. you are listing the files explicitly), it does not remove subdir/git-foo.sh.

BUGS

Each time a superproject update removes a populated submodule (e.g. when switching between commits before and after the removal) a stale submodule checkout will remain in the old location. Removing the old directory is only safe when it uses a gitfile, as otherwise the history of the submodule will be deleted too. This step will be obsolete when recursive submodule update has been implemented.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-send-email(1)

NAME

git-send-email - Send a collection of patches as emails

SYNOPSIS

git send-email [<options>] (<file>|<directory>)…
git send-email [<options>] <format-patch-options>
git send-email --dump-aliases
git send-email --translate-aliases

DESCRIPTION

Takes the patches given on the command line and emails them out. Patches can be specified as files, directories (which will send all files in the directory), or directly as a revision list. In the last case, any format accepted by the section called “git-format-patch(1)” can be passed to git send-email, as well as options understood by the section called “git-format-patch(1)”.

The header of the email is configurable via command-line options. If not specified on the command line, the user will be prompted with a ReadLine enabled interface to provide the necessary information.

There are two formats accepted for patch files:

  1. mbox format files

    This is what the section called “git-format-patch(1)” generates. Most headers and MIME formatting are ignored.

  2. The original format used by Greg Kroah-Hartman's send_lots_of_email.pl script

    This format expects the first line of the file to contain the "Cc:" value and the "Subject:" of the message as the second line.

OPTIONS

Composing

--annotate
Review and edit each patch you're about to send. Default is the value of sendemail.annotate. See the CONFIGURATION section for sendemail.multiEdit.
--bcc=<address>,…

Specify a "Bcc:" value for each email. Default is the value of sendemail.bcc.

This option may be specified multiple times.

--cc=<address>,…

Specify a starting "Cc:" value for each email. Default is the value of sendemail.cc.

This option may be specified multiple times.

--compose

Invoke a text editor (see GIT_EDITOR in the section called “git-var(1)”) to edit an introductory message for the patch series.

When --compose is used, git send-email will use the From, To, Cc, Bcc, Subject, Reply-To, and In-Reply-To headers specified in the message. If the body of the message (what you type after the headers and a blank line) only contains blank (or Git: prefixed) lines, the summary won't be sent, but the headers mentioned above will be used unless they are removed.

Missing From or In-Reply-To headers will be prompted for.

See the CONFIGURATION section for sendemail.multiEdit.

--from=<address>
Specify the sender of the emails. If not specified on the command line, the value of the sendemail.from configuration option is used. If neither the command-line option nor sendemail.from are set, then the user will be prompted for the value. The default for the prompt will be the value of GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT, or GIT_COMMITTER_IDENT if that is not set, as returned by "git var -l".
--reply-to=<address>
Specify the address where replies from recipients should go to. Use this if replies to messages should go to another address than what is specified with the --from parameter.
--in-reply-to=<identifier>

Make the first mail (or all the mails with --no-thread) appear as a reply to the given Message-ID, which avoids breaking threads to provide a new patch series. The second and subsequent emails will be sent as replies according to the --[no-]chain-reply-to setting.

So for example when --thread and --no-chain-reply-to are specified, the second and subsequent patches will be replies to the first one like in the illustration below where [PATCH v2 0/3] is in reply to [PATCH 0/2]:

[PATCH 0/2] Here is what I did...
  [PATCH 1/2] Clean up and tests
  [PATCH 2/2] Implementation
  [PATCH v2 0/3] Here is a reroll
    [PATCH v2 1/3] Clean up
    [PATCH v2 2/3] New tests
    [PATCH v2 3/3] Implementation

Only necessary if --compose is also set. If --compose is not set, this will be prompted for.

--[no-]outlook-id-fix

Microsoft Outlook SMTP servers discard the Message-ID sent via email and assign a new random Message-ID, thus breaking threads.

With --outlook-id-fix, git send-email uses a mechanism specific to Outlook servers to learn the Message-ID the server assigned to fix the threading. Use it only when you know that the server reports the rewritten Message-ID the same way as Outlook servers do.

Without this option specified, the fix is done by default when talking to smtp.office365.com or smtp-mail.outlook.com. Use --no-outlook-id-fix to disable even when talking to these two servers.

--subject=<string>
Specify the initial subject of the email thread. Only necessary if --compose is also set. If --compose is not set, this will be prompted for.
--to=<address>,…

Specify the primary recipient of the emails generated. Generally, this will be the upstream maintainer of the project involved. Default is the value of the sendemail.to configuration value; if that is unspecified, and --to-cmd is not specified, this will be prompted for.

This option may be specified multiple times.

--8bit-encoding=<encoding>

When encountering a non-ASCII message or subject that does not declare its encoding, add headers/quoting to indicate it is encoded in <encoding>. Default is the value of the sendemail.assume8bitEncoding; if that is unspecified, this will be prompted for if any non-ASCII files are encountered.

Note that no attempts whatsoever are made to validate the encoding.

--compose-encoding=<encoding>
Specify encoding of compose message. Default is the value of the sendemail.composeEncoding; if that is unspecified, UTF-8 is assumed.
--transfer-encoding=(7bit|8bit|quoted-printable|base64|auto)

Specify the transfer encoding to be used to send the message over SMTP. 7bit will fail upon encountering a non-ASCII message. quoted-printable can be useful when the repository contains files that contain carriage returns, but makes the raw patch email file (as saved from a MUA) much harder to inspect manually. base64 is even more fool proof, but also even more opaque. auto will use 8bit when possible, and quoted-printable otherwise.

Default is the value of the sendemail.transferEncoding configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to auto.

--xmailer , --no-xmailer
Add (or prevent adding) the "X-Mailer:" header. By default, the header is added, but it can be turned off by setting the sendemail.xmailer configuration variable to false.

Sending

--envelope-sender=<address>
Specify the envelope sender used to send the emails. This is useful if your default address is not the address that is subscribed to a list. In order to use the From address, set the value to "auto". If you use the sendmail binary, you must have suitable privileges for the -f parameter. Default is the value of the sendemail.envelopeSender configuration variable; if that is unspecified, choosing the envelope sender is left to your MTA.
--sendmail-cmd=<command>
Specify a command to run to send the email. The command should be sendmail-like; specifically, it must support the -i option. The command will be executed in the shell if necessary. Default is the value of sendemail.sendmailCmd. If unspecified, and if --smtp-server is also unspecified, git-send-email will search for sendmail in /usr/sbin, /usr/lib and $PATH.
--smtp-encryption=<encryption>
Specify in what way encrypting begins for the SMTP connection. Valid values are ssl and tls. Any other value reverts to plain (unencrypted) SMTP, which defaults to port 25. Despite the names, both values will use the same newer version of TLS, but for historic reasons have these names. ssl refers to "implicit" encryption (sometimes called SMTPS), that uses port 465 by default. tls refers to "explicit" encryption (often known as STARTTLS), that uses port 25 by default. Other ports might be used by the SMTP server, which are not the default. Commonly found alternative port for tls and unencrypted is 587. You need to check your provider's documentation or your server configuration to make sure for your own case. Default is the value of sendemail.smtpEncryption.
--smtp-domain=<FQDN>
Specifies the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) used in the HELO/EHLO command to the SMTP server. Some servers require the FQDN to match your IP address. If not set, git send-email attempts to determine your FQDN automatically. Default is the value of sendemail.smtpDomain.
--smtp-auth=<mechanisms>

Whitespace-separated list of allowed SMTP-AUTH mechanisms. This setting forces using only the listed mechanisms. Example:

$ git send-email --smtp-auth="PLAIN LOGIN GSSAPI" ...

If at least one of the specified mechanisms matches the ones advertised by the SMTP server and if it is supported by the utilized SASL library, the mechanism is used for authentication. If neither sendemail.smtpAuth nor --smtp-auth is specified, all mechanisms supported by the SASL library can be used. The special value none maybe specified to completely disable authentication independently of --smtp-user

--smtp-pass[=<password>]

Password for SMTP-AUTH. The argument is optional: If no argument is specified, then the empty string is used as the password. Default is the value of sendemail.smtpPass, however --smtp-pass always overrides this value.

Furthermore, passwords need not be specified in configuration files or on the command line. If a username has been specified (with --smtp-user or a sendemail.smtpUser), but no password has been specified (with --smtp-pass or sendemail.smtpPass), then a password is obtained using git-credential.

--no-smtp-auth
Disable SMTP authentication. Short hand for --smtp-auth=none
--smtp-server=<host>

If set, specifies the outgoing SMTP server to use (e.g. smtp.example.com or a raw IP address). If unspecified, and if --sendmail-cmd is also unspecified, the default is to search for sendmail in /usr/sbin, /usr/lib and $PATH if such a program is available, falling back to localhost otherwise.

For backward compatibility, this option can also specify a full pathname of a sendmail-like program instead; the program must support the -i option. This method does not support passing arguments or using plain command names. For those use cases, consider using --sendmail-cmd instead.

--smtp-server-port=<port>
Specifies a port different from the default port (SMTP servers typically listen to smtp port 25, but may also listen to submission port 587, or the common SSL smtp port 465); symbolic port names (e.g. "submission" instead of 587) are also accepted. The port can also be set with the sendemail.smtpServerPort configuration variable.
--smtp-server-option=<option>

If set, specifies the outgoing SMTP server option to use. Default value can be specified by the sendemail.smtpServerOption configuration option.

The --smtp-server-option option must be repeated for each option you want to pass to the server. Likewise, different lines in the configuration files must be used for each option.

--smtp-ssl
Legacy alias for --smtp-encryption ssl.
--smtp-ssl-cert-path
Path to a store of trusted CA certificates for SMTP SSL/TLS certificate validation (either a directory that has been processed by c_rehash, or a single file containing one or more PEM format certificates concatenated together: see verify(1) -CAfile and -CApath for more information on these). Set it to an empty string to disable certificate verification. Defaults to the value of the sendemail.smtpSSLCertPath configuration variable, if set, or the backing SSL library's compiled-in default otherwise (which should be the best choice on most platforms).
--smtp-user=<user>
Username for SMTP-AUTH. Default is the value of sendemail.smtpUser; if a username is not specified (with --smtp-user or sendemail.smtpUser), then authentication is not attempted.
--smtp-debug=(0|1)
Enable (1) or disable (0) debug output. If enabled, SMTP commands and replies will be printed. Useful to debug TLS connection and authentication problems.
--batch-size=<num>
Some email servers (e.g. smtp.163.com) limit the number emails to be sent per session (connection) and this will lead to a failure when sending many messages. With this option, send-email will disconnect after sending $<num> messages and wait for a few seconds (see --relogin-delay) and reconnect, to work around such a limit. You may want to use some form of credential helper to avoid having to retype your password every time this happens. Defaults to the sendemail.smtpBatchSize configuration variable.
--relogin-delay=<int>
Waiting $<int> seconds before reconnecting to SMTP server. Used together with --batch-size option. Defaults to the sendemail.smtpReloginDelay configuration variable.

Automating

--no-to , --no-cc , --no-bcc
Clears any list of "To:", "Cc:", "Bcc:" addresses previously set via config.
--no-identity
Clears the previously read value of sendemail.identity set via config, if any.
--to-cmd=<command>
Specify a command to execute once per patch file which should generate patch file specific "To:" entries. Output of this command must be single email address per line. Default is the value of sendemail.toCmd configuration value.
--cc-cmd=<command>
Specify a command to execute once per patch file which should generate patch file specific "Cc:" entries. Output of this command must be single email address per line. Default is the value of sendemail.ccCmd configuration value.
--header-cmd=<command>
Specify a command that is executed once per outgoing message and output RFC 2822 style header lines to be inserted into them. When the sendemail.headerCmd configuration variable is set, its value is always used. When --header-cmd is provided at the command line, its value takes precedence over the sendemail.headerCmd configuration variable.
--no-header-cmd
Disable any header command in use.
--[no-]chain-reply-to
If this is set, each email will be sent as a reply to the previous email sent. If disabled with "--no-chain-reply-to", all emails after the first will be sent as replies to the first email sent. When using this, it is recommended that the first file given be an overview of the entire patch series. Disabled by default, but the sendemail.chainReplyTo configuration variable can be used to enable it.
--identity=<identity>
A configuration identity. When given, causes values in the sendemail.<identity> subsection to take precedence over values in the sendemail section. The default identity is the value of sendemail.identity.
--[no-]signed-off-by-cc
If this is set, add emails found in the Signed-off-by trailer or Cc: lines to the cc list. Default is the value of sendemail.signedOffByCc configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to --signed-off-by-cc.
--[no-]cc-cover
If this is set, emails found in Cc: headers in the first patch of the series (typically the cover letter) are added to the cc list for each email set. Default is the value of sendemail.ccCover configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to --no-cc-cover.
--[no-]to-cover
If this is set, emails found in To: headers in the first patch of the series (typically the cover letter) are added to the to list for each email set. Default is the value of sendemail.toCover configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to --no-to-cover.
--suppress-cc=<category>

Specify an additional category of recipients to suppress the auto-cc of:

  • author will avoid including the patch author.
  • self will avoid including the sender.
  • cc will avoid including anyone mentioned in Cc lines in the patch header except for self (use self for that).
  • bodycc will avoid including anyone mentioned in Cc lines in the patch body (commit message) except for self (use self for that).
  • sob will avoid including anyone mentioned in the Signed-off-by trailers except for self (use self for that).
  • misc-by will avoid including anyone mentioned in Acked-by, Reviewed-by, Tested-by and other "-by" lines in the patch body, except Signed-off-by (use sob for that).
  • cccmd will avoid running the --cc-cmd.
  • body is equivalent to sob + bodycc + misc-by.
  • all will suppress all auto cc values.

Default is the value of sendemail.suppressCc configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to self if --suppress-from is specified, as well as body if --no-signed-off-cc is specified.

--[no-]suppress-from
If this is set, do not add the From: address to the cc: list. Default is the value of sendemail.suppressFrom configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to --no-suppress-from.
--[no-]thread

If this is set, the In-Reply-To and References headers will be added to each email sent. Whether each mail refers to the previous email (deep threading per git format-patch wording) or to the first email (shallow threading) is governed by "--[no-]chain-reply-to".

If disabled with "--no-thread", those headers will not be added (unless specified with --in-reply-to). Default is the value of the sendemail.thread configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to --thread.

It is up to the user to ensure that no In-Reply-To header already exists when git send-email is asked to add it (especially note that git format-patch can be configured to do the threading itself). Failure to do so may not produce the expected result in the recipient's MUA.

--[no-]mailmap
Use the mailmap file (see the section called “gitmailmap(5)”) to map all addresses to their canonical real name and email address. Additional mailmap data specific to git-send-email may be provided using the sendemail.mailmap.file or sendemail.mailmap.blob configuration values. Defaults to sendemail.mailmap.

Administering

--confirm=<mode>

Confirm just before sending:

  • always will always confirm before sending
  • never will never confirm before sending
  • cc will confirm before sending when send-email has automatically added addresses from the patch to the Cc list
  • compose will confirm before sending the first message when using --compose.
  • auto is equivalent to cc + compose

Default is the value of sendemail.confirm configuration value; if that is unspecified, default to auto unless any of the suppress options have been specified, in which case default to compose.

--dry-run
Do everything except actually send the emails.
--[no-]format-patch
When an argument may be understood either as a reference or as a file name, choose to understand it as a format-patch argument (--format-patch) or as a file name (--no-format-patch). By default, when such a conflict occurs, git send-email will fail.
--quiet
Make git-send-email less verbose. One line per email should be all that is output.
--[no-]validate

Perform sanity checks on patches. Currently, validation means the following:

Default is the value of sendemail.validate; if this is not set, default to --validate.

--force
Send emails even if safety checks would prevent it.

Information

--dump-aliases
Instead of the normal operation, dump the shorthand alias names from the configured alias file(s), one per line in alphabetical order. Note that this only includes the alias name and not its expanded email addresses. See sendemail.aliasesFile for more information about aliases.
--translate-aliases
Instead of the normal operation, read from standard input and interpret each line as an email alias. Translate it according to the configured alias file(s). Output each translated name and email address to standard output, one per line. See sendemail.aliasFile for more information about aliases.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

sendemail.identity
A configuration identity. When given, causes values in the sendemail.<identity> subsection to take precedence over values in the sendemail section. The default identity is the value of sendemail.identity.
sendemail.smtpEncryption
See the section called “git-send-email(1)” for description. Note that this setting is not subject to the identity mechanism.
sendemail.smtpSSLCertPath
Path to ca-certificates (either a directory or a single file). Set it to an empty string to disable certificate verification.
sendemail.<identity>.*
Identity-specific versions of the sendemail.* parameters found below, taking precedence over those when this identity is selected, through either the command-line or sendemail.identity.
sendemail.multiEdit
If true (default), a single editor instance will be spawned to edit files you have to edit (patches when --annotate is used, and the summary when --compose is used). If false, files will be edited one after the other, spawning a new editor each time.
sendemail.confirm
Sets the default for whether to confirm before sending. Must be one of always, never, cc, compose, or auto. See --confirm in the the section called “git-send-email(1)” documentation for the meaning of these values.
sendemail.mailmap
If true, makes the section called “git-send-email(1)” assume --mailmap, otherwise assume --no-mailmap. False by default.
sendemail.mailmap.file
The location of a the section called “git-send-email(1)” specific augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap and mailmap.file are loaded first. Thus, entries in this file take precedence over entries in the default mailmap locations. See the section called “gitmailmap(5)”.
sendemail.mailmap.blob
Like sendemail.mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. Entries in sendemail.mailmap.file take precedence over entries here. See the section called “gitmailmap(5)”.
sendemail.aliasesFile
To avoid typing long email addresses, point this to one or more email aliases files. You must also supply sendemail.aliasFileType.
sendemail.aliasFileType

Format of the file(s) specified in sendemail.aliasesFile. Must be one of mutt, mailrc, pine, elm, gnus, or sendmail.

What an alias file in each format looks like can be found in the documentation of the email program of the same name. The differences and limitations from the standard formats are described below:

sendmail
  • Quoted aliases and quoted addresses are not supported: lines that contain a " symbol are ignored.
  • Redirection to a file (/path/name) or pipe (|command) is not supported.
  • File inclusion (:include: /path/name) is not supported.
  • Warnings are printed on the standard error output for any explicitly unsupported constructs, and any other lines that are not recognized by the parser.
sendemail.annotate , sendemail.bcc , sendemail.cc , sendemail.ccCmd , sendemail.chainReplyTo , sendemail.envelopeSender , sendemail.from , sendemail.headerCmd , sendemail.signedOffByCc , sendemail.smtpPass , sendemail.suppressCc , sendemail.suppressFrom , sendemail.to , sendemail.toCmd , sendemail.smtpDomain , sendemail.smtpServer , sendemail.smtpServerPort , sendemail.smtpServerOption , sendemail.smtpUser , sendemail.thread , sendemail.transferEncoding , sendemail.validate , sendemail.xmailer
These configuration variables all provide a default for the section called “git-send-email(1)” command-line options. See its documentation for details.
sendemail.signedOffCc (deprecated)
Deprecated alias for sendemail.signedOffByCc.
sendemail.smtpBatchSize
Number of messages to be sent per connection, after that a relogin will happen. If the value is 0 or undefined, send all messages in one connection. See also the --batch-size option of the section called “git-send-email(1)”.
sendemail.smtpReloginDelay
Seconds to wait before reconnecting to the smtp server. See also the --relogin-delay option of the section called “git-send-email(1)”.
sendemail.forbidSendmailVariables
To avoid common misconfiguration mistakes, the section called “git-send-email(1)” will abort with a warning if any configuration options for "sendmail" exist. Set this variable to bypass the check.

EXAMPLES OF SMTP SERVERS

Use Gmail as the SMTP Server

To use git send-email to send your patches through the Gmail SMTP server, edit ~/.gitconfig to specify your account settings:

[sendemail]
        smtpEncryption = tls
        smtpServer = smtp.gmail.com
        smtpUser = yourname@gmail.com
        smtpServerPort = 587

If you have multi-factor authentication set up on your Gmail account, you can generate an app-specific password for use with git send-email. Visit https://security.google.com/settings/security/apppasswords to create it.

You can also use OAuth2.0 authentication with Gmail. OAUTHBEARER and XOAUTH2 are common methods used for this type of authentication. Gmail supports both of them. As an example, if you want to use OAUTHBEARER, edit your ~/.gitconfig file and add smtpAuth = OAUTHBEARER to your account settings:

[sendemail]
        smtpEncryption = tls
        smtpServer = smtp.gmail.com
        smtpUser = yourname@gmail.com
        smtpServerPort = 587
        smtpAuth = OAUTHBEARER

Use Microsoft Outlook as the SMTP Server

Unlike Gmail, Microsoft Outlook no longer supports app-specific passwords. Therefore, OAuth2.0 authentication must be used for Outlook. Also, it only supports XOAUTH2 authentication method.

Edit ~/.gitconfig to specify your account settings for Outlook and use its SMTP server with git send-email:

[sendemail]
        smtpEncryption = tls
        smtpServer = smtp.office365.com
        smtpUser = yourname@outlook.com
        smtpServerPort = 587
        smtpAuth = XOAUTH2

SENDING PATCHES

Once your commits are ready to be sent to the mailing list, run the following commands:

$ git format-patch --cover-letter -M origin/master -o outgoing/
$ edit outgoing/0000-*
$ git send-email outgoing/*

The first time you run it, you will be prompted for your credentials. Enter the app-specific or your regular password as appropriate.

If you have a credential helper configured (see the section called “git-credential(1)”), the password will be saved in the credential store so you won't have to type it the next time.

If you are using OAuth2.0 authentication, you need to use an access token in place of a password when prompted. Various OAuth2.0 token generators are available online. Community maintained credential helpers for Gmail and Outlook are also available:

You can also see the section called “gitcredentials(7)” for more OAuth based authentication helpers.

Note: the following core Perl modules that may be installed with your distribution of Perl are required: MIME::Base64, MIME::QuotedPrint, Net::Domain and Net::SMTP. These additional Perl modules are also required: Authen::SASL and Mail::Address.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-send-pack(1)

NAME

git-send-pack - Push objects over Git protocol to another repository

SYNOPSIS

git send-pack [--mirror] [--dry-run] [--force]
                [--receive-pack=<git-receive-pack>]
                [--verbose] [--thin] [--atomic]
                [--[no-]signed | --signed=(true|false|if-asked)]
                [<host>:]<directory> (--all | <ref>…)

DESCRIPTION

Usually you would want to use git push, which is a higher-level wrapper of this command, instead. See the section called “git-push(1)”.

Invokes git-receive-pack on a possibly remote repository, and updates it from the current repository, sending named refs.

OPTIONS

--receive-pack=<git-receive-pack>
Path to the git-receive-pack program on the remote end. Sometimes useful when pushing to a remote repository over ssh, and you do not have the program in a directory on the default $PATH.
--exec=<git-receive-pack>
Same as --receive-pack=<git-receive-pack>.
--all
Instead of explicitly specifying which refs to update, update all heads that locally exist.
--stdin

Take the list of refs from stdin, one per line. If there are refs specified on the command line in addition to this option, then the refs from stdin are processed after those on the command line.

If --stateless-rpc is specified together with this option then the list of refs must be in packet format (pkt-line). Each ref must be in a separate packet, and the list must end with a flush packet.

--dry-run
Do everything except actually send the updates.
--force
Usually, the command refuses to update a remote ref that is not an ancestor of the local ref used to overwrite it. This flag disables the check. This means that the remote repository can lose commits; use it with care.
--verbose
Run verbosely.
--thin
Send a "thin" pack, which records objects in deltified form based on objects not included in the pack to reduce network traffic.
--atomic
Use an atomic transaction for updating the refs. If any of the refs fails to update then the entire push will fail without changing any refs.
--[no-]signed , --signed=(true|false|if-asked)
GPG-sign the push request to update refs on the receiving side, to allow it to be checked by the hooks and/or be logged. If false or --no-signed, no signing will be attempted. If true or --signed, the push will fail if the server does not support signed pushes. If set to if-asked, sign if and only if the server supports signed pushes. The push will also fail if the actual call to gpg --sign fails. See the section called “git-receive-pack(1)” for the details on the receiving end.
--push-option=<string>
Pass the specified string as a push option for consumption by hooks on the server side. If the server doesn't support push options, error out. See the section called “git-push(1)” and the section called “githooks(5)” for details.
<host>
A remote host to house the repository. When this part is specified, git-receive-pack is invoked via ssh.
<directory>
The repository to update.
<ref>…
The remote refs to update.

SPECIFYING THE REFS

There are three ways to specify which refs to update on the remote end.

With the --all flag, all refs that exist locally are transferred to the remote side. You cannot specify any <ref> if you use this flag.

Without --all and without any <ref>, the heads that exist both on the local side and on the remote side are updated.

When one or more <ref> are specified explicitly (whether on the command line or via --stdin), it can be either a single pattern, or a pair of such patterns separated by a colon ":" (this means that a ref name cannot have a colon in it). A single pattern <name> is just shorthand for <name>:<name>.

Each pattern pair consists of the source side (before the colon) and the destination side (after the colon). The ref to be pushed is determined by finding a match that matches the source side, and where it is pushed is determined by using the destination side. The rules used to match a ref are the same rules used by git rev-parse to resolve a symbolic ref name. See the section called “git-rev-parse(1)”.

  • It is an error if <src> does not match exactly one of the local refs.
  • It is an error if <dst> matches more than one remote ref.
  • If <dst> does not match any remote ref, either

    • it has to start with "refs/"; <dst> is used as the destination literally in this case.
    • <src> == <dst> and the ref that matched the <src> must not exist in the set of remote refs; the ref matched <src> locally is used as the name of the destination.

Without --force, the <src> ref is stored at the remote only if <dst> does not exist, or <dst> is a proper subset (i.e. an ancestor) of <src>. This check, known as the "fast-forward check", is performed to avoid accidentally overwriting the remote ref and losing other people's commits from there.

With --force, the fast-forward check is disabled for all refs.

Optionally, a <ref> parameter can be prefixed with a plus + sign to disable the fast-forward check only on that ref.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-sh-i18n--envsubst(1)

NAME

git-sh-i18n--envsubst - Git's own envsubst(1) for i18n fallbacks

SYNOPSIS

eval_gettext () {
        printf "%s" "$1" | (
                export PATH $(git sh-i18n--envsubst --variables "$1");
                git sh-i18n--envsubst "$1"
        )
}

DESCRIPTION

This is not a command the end user would want to run. Ever. This documentation is meant for people who are studying the plumbing scripts and/or are writing new ones.

git sh-i18n--envsubst is Git's stripped-down copy of the GNU envsubst(1) program that comes with the GNU gettext package. It's used internally by the section called “git-sh-i18n(1)” to interpolate the variables passed to the eval_gettext function.

No promises are made about the interface, or that this program won't disappear without warning in the next version of Git. Don't use it.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-sh-i18n(1)

NAME

git-sh-i18n - Git's i18n setup code for shell scripts

SYNOPSIS

. "$(git --exec-path)/git-sh-i18n"

DESCRIPTION

This is not a command the end user would want to run. Ever. This documentation is meant for people who are studying the Porcelain-ish scripts and/or are writing new ones.

The 'git sh-i18n scriptlet is designed to be sourced (using .) by Git's porcelain programs implemented in shell script. It provides wrappers for the GNU gettext and eval_gettext functions accessible through the gettext.sh script, and provides pass-through fallbacks on systems without GNU gettext.

FUNCTIONS

gettext
Currently a dummy fall-through function implemented as a wrapper around printf(1). Will be replaced by a real gettext implementation in a later version.
eval_gettext
Currently a dummy fall-through function implemented as a wrapper around printf(1) with variables expanded by the the section called “git-sh-i18n--envsubst(1)” helper. Will be replaced by a real gettext implementation in a later version.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-sh-setup(1)

NAME

git-sh-setup - Common Git shell script setup code

SYNOPSIS

. "$(git --exec-path)/git-sh-setup"

DESCRIPTION

This is not a command the end user would want to run. Ever. This documentation is meant for people who are studying the Porcelain-ish scripts and/or are writing new ones.

The git sh-setup scriptlet is designed to be sourced (using .) by other shell scripts to set up some variables pointing at the normal Git directories and a few helper shell functions.

Before sourcing it, your script should set up a few variables; USAGE (and LONG_USAGE, if any) is used to define the message given by usage() shell function. SUBDIRECTORY_OK can be set if the script can run from a subdirectory of the working tree (some commands do not).

The scriptlet sets GIT_DIR and GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY shell variables, but does not export them to the environment.

FUNCTIONS

die
exit after emitting the supplied error message to the standard error stream.
usage
die with the usage message.
set_reflog_action
Set GIT_REFLOG_ACTION environment to a given string (typically the name of the program) unless it is already set. Whenever the script runs a git command that updates refs, a reflog entry is created using the value of this string to leave the record of what command updated the ref.
git_editor
runs an editor of user's choice (GIT_EDITOR, core.editor, VISUAL or EDITOR) on a given file, but error out if no editor is specified and the terminal is dumb.
is_bare_repository
outputs true or false to the standard output stream to indicate if the repository is a bare repository (i.e. without an associated working tree).
cd_to_toplevel
runs chdir to the toplevel of the working tree.
require_work_tree
checks if the current directory is within the working tree of the repository, and otherwise dies.
require_work_tree_exists
checks if the working tree associated with the repository exists, and otherwise dies. Often done before calling cd_to_toplevel, which is impossible to do if there is no working tree.
require_clean_work_tree <action> [<hint>]

checks that the working tree and index associated with the repository have no uncommitted changes to tracked files. Otherwise it emits an error message of the form Cannot <action>: <reason>. <hint>, and dies. Example:

require_clean_work_tree rebase "Please commit or stash them."
get_author_ident_from_commit
outputs code for use with eval to set the GIT_AUTHOR_NAME, GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL and GIT_AUTHOR_DATE variables for a given commit.
create_virtual_base
modifies the first file so only lines in common with the second file remain. If there is insufficient common material, then the first file is left empty. The result is suitable as a virtual base input for a 3-way merge.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-shell(1)

NAME

git-shell - Restricted login shell for Git-only SSH access

SYNOPSIS

chsh -s $(command -v git-shell) <user>
git clone <user>@localhost:/path/to/repo.git
ssh <user>@localhost

DESCRIPTION

This is a login shell for SSH accounts to provide restricted Git access. It permits execution only of server-side Git commands implementing the pull/push functionality, plus custom commands present in a subdirectory named git-shell-commands in the user's home directory.

COMMANDS

git shell accepts the following commands after the -c option:

git receive-pack <argument> , git upload-pack <argument> , git upload-archive <argument>
Call the corresponding server-side command to support the client's git push, git fetch, or git archive --remote request.
cvs server
Imitate a CVS server. See the section called “git-cvsserver(1)”.

If a ~/git-shell-commands directory is present, git shell will also handle other, custom commands by running "git-shell-commands/<command> <arguments>" from the user's home directory.

INTERACTIVE USE

By default, the commands above can be executed only with the -c option; the shell is not interactive.

If a ~/git-shell-commands directory is present, git shell can also be run interactively (with no arguments). If a help command is present in the git-shell-commands directory, it is run to provide the user with an overview of allowed actions. Then a "git> " prompt is presented at which one can enter any of the commands from the git-shell-commands directory, or exit to close the connection.

Generally this mode is used as an administrative interface to allow users to list repositories they have access to, create, delete, or rename repositories, or change repository descriptions and permissions.

If a no-interactive-login command exists, then it is run and the interactive shell is aborted.

EXAMPLES

To disable interactive logins, displaying a greeting instead:

$ chsh -s /usr/bin/git-shell
$ mkdir $HOME/git-shell-commands
$ cat >$HOME/git-shell-commands/no-interactive-login <<\EOF
#!/bin/sh
printf '%s\n' "Hi $USER! You've successfully authenticated, but I do not"
printf '%s\n' "provide interactive shell access."
exit 128
EOF
$ chmod +x $HOME/git-shell-commands/no-interactive-login

To enable git-cvsserver access (which should generally have the no-interactive-login example above as a prerequisite, as creating the git-shell-commands directory allows interactive logins):

$ cat >$HOME/git-shell-commands/cvs <<\EOF
if ! test $# = 1 && test "$1" = "server"
then
        echo >&2 "git-cvsserver only handles \"server\""
        exit 1
fi
exec git cvsserver server
EOF
$ chmod +x $HOME/git-shell-commands/cvs

SEE ALSO

ssh(1), the section called “git-daemon(1)”, contrib/git-shell-commands/README

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-shortlog(1)

NAME

git-shortlog - Summarize git log output

SYNOPSIS

git shortlog [<options>] [<revision-range>] [[--] <path>…]
git log --pretty=short | git shortlog [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

Summarizes git log output in a format suitable for inclusion in release announcements. Each commit will be grouped by author and title.

Additionally, "[PATCH]" will be stripped from the commit description.

If no revisions are passed on the command line and either standard input is not a terminal or there is no current branch, git shortlog will output a summary of the log read from standard input, without reference to the current repository.

OPTIONS

-n , --numbered
Sort output according to the number of commits per author instead of author alphabetic order.
-s , --summary
Suppress commit description and provide a commit count summary only.
-e , --email
Show the email address of each author.
--format[=<format>]

Instead of the commit subject, use some other information to describe each commit. <format> can be any string accepted by the --format option of git log, such as * [%h] %s. (See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section of the section called “git-log(1)”.)

Each pretty-printed commit will be rewrapped before it is shown.
--date=<format>
Show dates formatted according to the given date string. (See the --date option in the "Commit Formatting" section of the section called “git-log(1)”). Useful with --group=format:<format>.
--group=<type>

Group commits based on <type>. If no --group option is specified, the default is author. <type> is one of:

  • author, commits are grouped by author
  • committer, commits are grouped by committer (the same as -c)
  • trailer:<field>, the <field> is interpreted as a case-insensitive commit message trailer (see the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”). For example, if your project uses Reviewed-by trailers, you might want to see who has been reviewing with git shortlog -ns --group=trailer:reviewed-by.
  • format:<format>, any string accepted by the --format option of git log. (See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section of the section called “git-log(1)”.)

    Note that commits that do not include the trailer will not be counted. Likewise, commits with multiple trailers (e.g., multiple signoffs) may be counted more than once (but only once per unique trailer value in that commit).

    Shortlog will attempt to parse each trailer value as a name <email> identity. If successful, the mailmap is applied and the email is omitted unless the --email option is specified. If the value cannot be parsed as an identity, it will be taken literally and completely.

If --group is specified multiple times, commits are counted under each value (but again, only once per unique value in that commit). For example, git shortlog --group=author --group=trailer:co-authored-by counts both authors and co-authors.

-c , --committer
This is an alias for --group=committer.
-w[<width>[,<indent1>[,<indent2>]]]

Linewrap the output by wrapping each line at width. The first line of each entry is indented by indent1 spaces, and the second and subsequent lines are indented by indent2 spaces. width, indent1, and indent2 default to 76, 6 and 9 respectively.

If width is 0 (zero) then indent the lines of the output without wrapping them.

<revision-range>
Show only commits in the specified revision range. When no <revision-range> is specified, it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the whole history leading to the current commit). origin..HEAD specifies all the commits reachable from the current commit (i.e. HEAD), but not from origin. For a complete list of ways to spell <revision-range>, see the "Specifying Ranges" section of the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.
[--] <path>…

Consider only commits that are enough to explain how the files that match the specified paths came to be.

Paths may need to be prefixed with -- to separate them from options or the revision range, when confusion arises.

Commit Limiting

Besides specifying a range of commits that should be listed using the special notations explained in the description, additional commit limiting may be applied.

Using more options generally further limits the output (e.g. --since=<date1> limits to commits newer than <date1>, and using it with --grep=<pattern> further limits to commits whose log message has a line that matches <pattern>), unless otherwise noted.

Note that these are applied before commit ordering and formatting options, such as --reverse.

-<number> , -n <number> , --max-count=<number>
Limit the number of commits to output.
--skip=<number>
Skip number commits before starting to show the commit output.
--since=<date> , --after=<date>
Show commits more recent than a specific date.
--since-as-filter=<date>
Show all commits more recent than a specific date. This visits all commits in the range, rather than stopping at the first commit which is older than a specific date.
--until=<date> , --before=<date>
Show commits older than a specific date.
--author=<pattern> , --committer=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with author/committer header lines that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --author=<pattern>, commits whose author matches any of the given patterns are chosen (similarly for multiple --committer=<pattern>).
--grep-reflog=<pattern>
Limit the commits output to ones with reflog entries that match the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep-reflog, commits whose reflog message matches any of the given patterns are chosen. It is an error to use this option unless --walk-reflogs is in use.
--grep=<pattern>

Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that matches the specified pattern (regular expression). With more than one --grep=<pattern>, commits whose message matches any of the given patterns are chosen (but see --all-match).

When --notes is in effect, the message from the notes is matched as if it were part of the log message.

--all-match
Limit the commits output to ones that match all given --grep, instead of ones that match at least one.
--invert-grep
Limit the commits output to ones with a log message that do not match the pattern specified with --grep=<pattern>.
-i , --regexp-ignore-case
Match the regular expression limiting patterns without regard to letter case.
--basic-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be basic regular expressions; this is the default.
-E , --extended-regexp
Consider the limiting patterns to be extended regular expressions instead of the default basic regular expressions.
-F , --fixed-strings
Consider the limiting patterns to be fixed strings (don't interpret pattern as a regular expression).
-P , --perl-regexp

Consider the limiting patterns to be Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Support for these types of regular expressions is an optional compile-time dependency. If Git wasn't compiled with support for them providing this option will cause it to die.

--remove-empty
Stop when a given path disappears from the tree.
--merges
Print only merge commits. This is exactly the same as --min-parents=2.
--no-merges
Do not print commits with more than one parent. This is exactly the same as --max-parents=1.
--min-parents=<number> , --max-parents=<number> , --no-min-parents , --no-max-parents

Show only commits which have at least (or at most) that many parent commits. In particular, --max-parents=1 is the same as --no-merges, --min-parents=2 is the same as --merges. --max-parents=0 gives all root commits and --min-parents=3 all octopus merges.

--no-min-parents and --no-max-parents reset these limits (to no limit) again. Equivalent forms are --min-parents=0 (any commit has 0 or more parents) and --max-parents=-1 (negative numbers denote no upper limit).

--first-parent
When finding commits to include, follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge.
--exclude-first-parent-only
When finding commits to exclude (with a ^), follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This can be used to find the set of changes in a topic branch from the point where it diverged from the remote branch, given that arbitrary merges can be valid topic branch changes.
--not
Reverses the meaning of the ^ prefix (or lack thereof) for all following revision specifiers, up to the next --not. When used on the command line before --stdin, the revisions passed through stdin will not be affected by it. Conversely, when passed via standard input, the revisions passed on the command line will not be affected by it.
--all
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/, along with HEAD, are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--branches[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/heads are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--tags[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/tags are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit tags to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--remotes[=<pattern>]
Pretend as if all the refs in refs/remotes are listed on the command line as <commit>. If <pattern> is given, limit remote-tracking branches to ones matching given shell glob. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--glob=<glob-pattern>
Pretend as if all the refs matching shell glob <glob-pattern> are listed on the command line as <commit>. Leading refs/, is automatically prepended if missing. If pattern lacks ?, *, or [, /* at the end is implied.
--exclude=<glob-pattern>

Do not include refs matching <glob-pattern> that the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob would otherwise consider. Repetitions of this option accumulate exclusion patterns up to the next --all, --branches, --tags, --remotes, or --glob option (other options or arguments do not clear accumulated patterns).

The patterns given should not begin with refs/heads, refs/tags, or refs/remotes when applied to --branches, --tags, or --remotes, respectively, and they must begin with refs/ when applied to --glob or --all. If a trailing /* is intended, it must be given explicitly.

--exclude-hidden=[fetch|receive|uploadpack]
Do not include refs that would be hidden by git-fetch, git-receive-pack or git-upload-pack by consulting the appropriate fetch.hideRefs, receive.hideRefs or uploadpack.hideRefs configuration along with transfer.hideRefs (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This option affects the next pseudo-ref option --all or --glob and is cleared after processing them.
--reflog
Pretend as if all objects mentioned by reflogs are listed on the command line as <commit>.
--alternate-refs
Pretend as if all objects mentioned as ref tips of alternate repositories were listed on the command line. An alternate repository is any repository whose object directory is specified in objects/info/alternates. The set of included objects may be modified by core.alternateRefsCommand, etc. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--single-worktree
By default, all working trees will be examined by the following options when there are more than one (see the section called “git-worktree(1)”): --all, --reflog and --indexed-objects. This option forces them to examine the current working tree only.
--ignore-missing
Upon seeing an invalid object name in the input, pretend as if the bad input was not given.
--bisect
Pretend as if the bad bisection ref refs/bisect/bad was listed and as if it was followed by --not and the good bisection refs refs/bisect/good-* on the command line.
--stdin
In addition to getting arguments from the command line, read them from standard input as well. This accepts commits and pseudo-options like --all and --glob=. When a -- separator is seen, the following input is treated as paths and used to limit the result. Flags like --not which are read via standard input are only respected for arguments passed in the same way and will not influence any subsequent command line arguments.
--cherry-mark
Like --cherry-pick (see below) but mark equivalent commits with = rather than omitting them, and inequivalent ones with +.
--cherry-pick

Omit any commit that introduces the same change as another commit on the other side when the set of commits are limited with symmetric difference.

For example, if you have two branches, A and B, a usual way to list all commits on only one side of them is with --left-right (see the example below in the description of the --left-right option). However, it shows the commits that were cherry-picked from the other branch (for example, 3rd on b may be cherry-picked from branch A). With this option, such pairs of commits are excluded from the output.

--left-only , --right-only

List only commits on the respective side of a symmetric difference, i.e. only those which would be marked < resp. > by --left-right.

For example, --cherry-pick --right-only A...B omits those commits from B which are in A or are patch-equivalent to a commit in A. In other words, this lists the + commits from git cherry A B. More precisely, --cherry-pick --right-only --no-merges gives the exact list.

--cherry
A synonym for --right-only --cherry-mark --no-merges; useful to limit the output to the commits on our side and mark those that have been applied to the other side of a forked history with git log --cherry upstream...mybranch, similar to git cherry upstream mybranch.
-g , --walk-reflogs

Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain, walk reflog entries from the most recent one to older ones. When this option is used you cannot specify commits to exclude (that is, ^commit, commit1..commit2, and commit1...commit2 notations cannot be used).

With --pretty format other than oneline and reference (for obvious reasons), this causes the output to have two extra lines of information taken from the reflog. The reflog designator in the output may be shown as ref@{<Nth>} (where <Nth> is the reverse-chronological index in the reflog) or as ref@{<timestamp>} (with the <timestamp> for that entry), depending on a few rules:

  1. If the starting point is specified as ref@{<Nth>}, show the index format.
  2. If the starting point was specified as ref@{now}, show the timestamp format.
  3. If neither was used, but --date was given on the command line, show the timestamp in the format requested by --date.
  4. Otherwise, show the index format.

Under --pretty=oneline, the commit message is prefixed with this information on the same line. This option cannot be combined with --reverse. See also the section called “git-reflog(1)”.

Under --pretty=reference, this information will not be shown at all.

--merge
Show commits touching conflicted paths in the range HEAD...<other>, where <other> is the first existing pseudoref in MERGE_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD, REVERT_HEAD or REBASE_HEAD. Only works when the index has unmerged entries. This option can be used to show relevant commits when resolving conflicts from a 3-way merge.
--boundary
Output excluded boundary commits. Boundary commits are prefixed with -.

History Simplification

Sometimes you are only interested in parts of the history, for example the commits modifying a particular <path>. But there are two parts of History Simplification, one part is selecting the commits and the other is how to do it, as there are various strategies to simplify the history.

The following options select the commits to be shown:

<paths>
Commits modifying the given <paths> are selected.
--simplify-by-decoration
Commits that are referred by some branch or tag are selected.

Note that extra commits can be shown to give a meaningful history.

The following options affect the way the simplification is performed:

Default mode
Simplifies the history to the simplest history explaining the final state of the tree. Simplest because it prunes some side branches if the end result is the same (i.e. merging branches with the same content)
--show-pulls
Include all commits from the default mode, but also any merge commits that are not TREESAME to the first parent but are TREESAME to a later parent. This mode is helpful for showing the merge commits that "first introduced" a change to a branch.
--full-history
Same as the default mode, but does not prune some history.
--dense
Only the selected commits are shown, plus some to have a meaningful history.
--sparse
All commits in the simplified history are shown.
--simplify-merges
Additional option to --full-history to remove some needless merges from the resulting history, as there are no selected commits contributing to this merge.
--ancestry-path[=<commit>]
When given a range of commits to display (e.g. commit1..commit2 or commit2 ^commit1), and a commit <commit> in that range, only display commits in that range that are ancestors of <commit>, descendants of <commit>, or <commit> itself. If no commit is specified, use commit1 (the excluded part of the range) as <commit>. Can be passed multiple times; if so, a commit is included if it is any of the commits given or if it is an ancestor or descendant of one of them.

A more detailed explanation follows.

Suppose you specified foo as the <paths>. We shall call commits that modify foo !TREESAME, and the rest TREESAME. (In a diff filtered for foo, they look different and equal, respectively.)

In the following, we will always refer to the same example history to illustrate the differences between simplification settings. We assume that you are filtering for a file foo in this commit graph:

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /   /
        I     B   C   D   E   Y
         \   /   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'   X

The horizontal line of history A---Q is taken to be the first parent of each merge. The commits are:

  • I is the initial commit, in which foo exists with contents asdf, and a file quux exists with contents quux. Initial commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.
  • In A, foo contains just foo.
  • B contains the same change as A. Its merge M is trivial and hence TREESAME to all parents.
  • C does not change foo, but its merge N changes it to foobar, so it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • D sets foo to baz. Its merge O combines the strings from N and D to foobarbaz; i.e., it is not TREESAME to any parent.
  • E changes quux to xyzzy, and its merge P combines the strings to quux xyzzy. P is TREESAME to O, but not to E.
  • X is an independent root commit that added a new file side, and Y modified it. Y is TREESAME to X. Its merge Q added side to P, and Q is TREESAME to P, but not to Y.

rev-list walks backwards through history, including or excluding commits based on whether --full-history and/or parent rewriting (via --parents or --children) are used. The following settings are available.

Default mode

Commits are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent (though this can be changed, see --sparse below). If the commit was a merge, and it was TREESAME to one parent, follow only that parent. (Even if there are several TREESAME parents, follow only one of them.) Otherwise, follow all parents.

This results in:

          .-A---N---O
         /     /   /
        I---------D

Note how the rule to only follow the TREESAME parent, if one is available, removed B from consideration entirely. C was considered via N, but is TREESAME. Root commits are compared to an empty tree, so I is !TREESAME.

Parent/child relations are only visible with --parents, but that does not affect the commits selected in default mode, so we have shown the parent lines.

--full-history without parent rewriting

This mode differs from the default in one point: always follow all parents of a merge, even if it is TREESAME to one of them. Even if more than one side of the merge has commits that are included, this does not imply that the merge itself is! In the example, we get

        I  A  B  N  D  O  P  Q

M was excluded because it is TREESAME to both parents. E, C and B were all walked, but only B was !TREESAME, so the others do not appear.

Note that without parent rewriting, it is not really possible to talk about the parent/child relationships between the commits, so we show them disconnected.

--full-history with parent rewriting

Ordinary commits are only included if they are !TREESAME (though this can be changed, see --sparse below).

Merges are always included. However, their parent list is rewritten: Along each parent, prune away commits that are not included themselves. This results in

          .-A---M---N---O---P---Q
         /     /   /   /   /
        I     B   /   D   /
         \   /   /   /   /
          `-------------'

Compare to --full-history without rewriting above. Note that E was pruned away because it is TREESAME, but the parent list of P was rewritten to contain E's parent I. The same happened for C and N, and X, Y and Q.

In addition to the above settings, you can change whether TREESAME affects inclusion:

--dense
Commits that are walked are included if they are not TREESAME to any parent.
--sparse

All commits that are walked are included.

Note that without --full-history, this still simplifies merges: if one of the parents is TREESAME, we follow only that one, so the other sides of the merge are never walked.

--simplify-merges

First, build a history graph in the same way that --full-history with parent rewriting does (see above).

Then simplify each commit C to its replacement C' in the final history according to the following rules:

  • Set C' to C.
  • Replace each parent P of C' with its simplification P'. In the process, drop parents that are ancestors of other parents or that are root commits TREESAME to an empty tree, and remove duplicates, but take care to never drop all parents that we are TREESAME to.
  • If after this parent rewriting, C' is a root or merge commit (has zero or >1 parents), a boundary commit, or !TREESAME, it remains. Otherwise, it is replaced with its only parent.

The effect of this is best shown by way of comparing to --full-history with parent rewriting. The example turns into:

          .-A---M---N---O
         /     /       /
        I     B       D
         \   /       /
          `---------'

Note the major differences in N, P, and Q over --full-history:

  • N's parent list had I removed, because it is an ancestor of the other parent M. Still, N remained because it is !TREESAME.
  • P's parent list similarly had I removed. P was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.
  • Q's parent list had Y simplified to X. X was then removed, because it was a TREESAME root. Q was then removed completely, because it had one parent and is TREESAME.

There is another simplification mode available:

--ancestry-path[=<commit>]

Limit the displayed commits to those which are an ancestor of <commit>, or which are a descendant of <commit>, or are <commit> itself.

As an example use case, consider the following commit history:

            D---E-------F
           /     \       \
          B---C---G---H---I---J
         /                     \
        A-------K---------------L--M

A regular D..M computes the set of commits that are ancestors of M, but excludes the ones that are ancestors of D. This is useful to see what happened to the history leading to M since D, in the sense that what does M have that did not exist in D. The result in this example would be all the commits, except A and B (and D itself, of course).

When we want to find out what commits in M are contaminated with the bug introduced by D and need fixing, however, we might want to view only the subset of D..M that are actually descendants of D, i.e. excluding C and K. This is exactly what the --ancestry-path option does. Applied to the D..M range, it results in:

                E-------F
                 \       \
                  G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

We can also use --ancestry-path=D instead of --ancestry-path which means the same thing when applied to the D..M range but is just more explicit.

If we instead are interested in a given topic within this range, and all commits affected by that topic, we may only want to view the subset of D..M which contain that topic in their ancestry path. So, using --ancestry-path=H D..M for example would result in:

                E
                 \
              C---G---H---I---J
                               \
                                L--M

Whereas --ancestry-path=K D..M would result in

                K---------------L--M

Before discussing another option, --show-pulls, we need to create a new example history.

A common problem users face when looking at simplified history is that a commit they know changed a file somehow does not appear in the file's simplified history. Let's demonstrate a new example and show how options such as --full-history and --simplify-merges works in that case:

          .-A---M-----C--N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`-Z'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `---Y--'

For this example, suppose I created file.txt which was modified by A, B, and X in different ways. The single-parent commits C, Z, and Y do not change file.txt. The merge commit M was created by resolving the merge conflict to include both changes from A and B and hence is not TREESAME to either. The merge commit R, however, was created by ignoring the contents of file.txt at M and taking only the contents of file.txt at X. Hence, R is TREESAME to X but not M. Finally, the natural merge resolution to create N is to take the contents of file.txt at R, so N is TREESAME to R but not C. The merge commits O and P are TREESAME to their first parents, but not to their second parents, Z and Y respectively.

When using the default mode, N and R both have a TREESAME parent, so those edges are walked and the others are ignored. The resulting history graph is:

        I---X

When using --full-history, Git walks every edge. This will discover the commits A and B and the merge M, but also will reveal the merge commits O and P. With parent rewriting, the resulting graph is:

          .-A---M--------N---O---P
         /     / \  \  \/   /   /
        I     B   \  R-'`--'   /
         \   /     \/         /
          \ /      /\        /
           `---X--'  `------'

Here, the merge commits O and P contribute extra noise, as they did not actually contribute a change to file.txt. They only merged a topic that was based on an older version of file.txt. This is a common issue in repositories using a workflow where many contributors work in parallel and merge their topic branches along a single trunk: many unrelated merges appear in the --full-history results.

When using the --simplify-merges option, the commits O and P disappear from the results. This is because the rewritten second parents of O and P are reachable from their first parents. Those edges are removed and then the commits look like single-parent commits that are TREESAME to their parent. This also happens to the commit N, resulting in a history view as follows:

          .-A---M--.
         /     /    \
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

In this view, we see all of the important single-parent changes from A, B, and X. We also see the carefully-resolved merge M and the not-so-carefully-resolved merge R. This is usually enough information to determine why the commits A and B "disappeared" from history in the default view. However, there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is performance. Unlike any previous option, the --simplify-merges option requires walking the entire commit history before returning a single result. This can make the option difficult to use for very large repositories.

The second issue is one of auditing. When many contributors are working on the same repository, it is important which merge commits introduced a change into an important branch. The problematic merge R above is not likely to be the merge commit that was used to merge into an important branch. Instead, the merge N was used to merge R and X into the important branch. This commit may have information about why the change X came to override the changes from A and B in its commit message.

--show-pulls

In addition to the commits shown in the default history, show each merge commit that is not TREESAME to its first parent but is TREESAME to a later parent.

When a merge commit is included by --show-pulls, the merge is treated as if it "pulled" the change from another branch. When using --show-pulls on this example (and no other options) the resulting graph is:

        I---X---R---N

Here, the merge commits R and N are included because they pulled the commits X and R into the base branch, respectively. These merges are the reason the commits A and B do not appear in the default history.

When --show-pulls is paired with --simplify-merges, the graph includes all of the necessary information:

          .-A---M--.   N
         /     /    \ /
        I     B      R
         \   /      /
          \ /      /
           `---X--'

Notice that since M is reachable from R, the edge from N to M was simplified away. However, N still appears in the history as an important commit because it "pulled" the change R into the main branch.

The --simplify-by-decoration option allows you to view only the big picture of the topology of the history, by omitting commits that are not referenced by tags. Commits are marked as !TREESAME (in other words, kept after history simplification rules described above) if (1) they are referenced by tags, or (2) they change the contents of the paths given on the command line. All other commits are marked as TREESAME (subject to be simplified away).

MAPPING AUTHORS

See the section called “gitmailmap(5)”.

Note that if git shortlog is run outside of a repository (to process log contents on standard input), it will look for a .mailmap file in the current directory.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-show-branch(1)

NAME

git-show-branch - Show branches and their commits

SYNOPSIS

git show-branch [-a | --all] [-r | --remotes] [--topo-order | --date-order]
                [--current] [--color[=<when>] | --no-color] [--sparse]
                [--more=<n> | --list | --independent | --merge-base]
                [--no-name | --sha1-name] [--topics]
                [(<rev> | <glob>)…]
git show-branch (-g | --reflog)[=<n>[,<base>]] [--list] [<ref>]

DESCRIPTION

Shows the commit ancestry graph starting from the commits named with <rev>s or <glob>s (or all refs under refs/heads and/or refs/tags) semi-visually.

It cannot show more than 26 branches and commits at a time.

It uses showbranch.default multi-valued configuration items if no <rev> or <glob> is given on the command line.

OPTIONS

<rev>
Arbitrary extended SHA-1 expression (see the section called “gitrevisions(7)”) that typically names a branch head or a tag.
<glob>
A glob pattern that matches branch or tag names under refs/. For example, if you have many topic branches under refs/heads/topic, giving topic/* would show all of them.
-r , --remotes
Show the remote-tracking branches.
-a , --all
Show both remote-tracking branches and local branches.
--current
With this option, the command includes the current branch in the list of revs to be shown when it is not given on the command line.
--topo-order
By default, the branches and their commits are shown in reverse chronological order. This option makes them appear in topological order (i.e., descendant commits are shown before their parents).
--date-order
This option is similar to --topo-order in the sense that no parent comes before all of its children, but otherwise commits are ordered according to their commit date.
--sparse
By default, the output omits merges that are reachable from only one tip being shown. This option makes them visible.
--more=<n>
Usually the command stops output upon showing the commit that is the common ancestor of all the branches. This flag tells the command to go <n> more common commits beyond that. When <n> is negative, display only the <ref>s given, without showing the commit ancestry tree.
--list
Synonym to --more=-1
--merge-base
Instead of showing the commit list, determine possible merge bases for the specified commits. All merge bases will be contained in all specified commits. This is different from how the section called “git-merge-base(1)” handles the case of three or more commits.
--independent
Among the <ref>s given, display only the ones that cannot be reached from any other <ref>.
--no-name
Do not show naming strings for each commit.
--sha1-name
Instead of naming the commits using the path to reach them from heads (e.g. "master~2" to mean the grandparent of "master"), name them with the unique prefix of their object names.
--topics
Shows only commits that are NOT on the first branch given. This helps track topic branches by hiding any commit that is already in the main line of development. When given "git show-branch --topics master topic1 topic2", this will show the revisions given by "git rev-list ^master topic1 topic2"
-g , --reflog[=<n>[,<base>]] [<ref>]
Shows <n> most recent ref-log entries for the given ref. If <base> is given, <n> entries going back from that entry. <base> can be specified as count or date. When no explicit <ref> parameter is given, it defaults to the current branch (or HEAD if it is detached).
--color[=<when>]
Color the status sign (one of these: * ! + -) of each commit corresponding to the branch it's in. The value must be always (the default), never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored output, even when the configuration file gives the default to color output. Same as --color=never.

Note that --more, --list, --independent, and --merge-base options are mutually exclusive.

OUTPUT

Given N <ref>s, the first N lines are the one-line description from their commit message. The branch head that is pointed at by $GIT_DIR/HEAD is prefixed with an asterisk * character while other heads are prefixed with a ! character.

Following these N lines, a one-line log for each commit is displayed, indented N places. If a commit is on the I-th branch, the I-th indentation character shows a + sign; otherwise it shows a space. Merge commits are denoted by a - sign. Each commit shows a short name that can be used as an extended SHA-1 to name that commit.

The following example shows three branches, "master", "fixes", and "mhf":

$ git show-branch master fixes mhf
* [master] Add 'git show-branch'.
 ! [fixes] Introduce "reset type" flag to "git reset"
  ! [mhf] Allow "+remote:local" refspec to cause --force when fetching.
---
  + [mhf] Allow "+remote:local" refspec to cause --force when fetching.
  + [mhf~1] Use git-octopus when pulling more than one head.
 +  [fixes] Introduce "reset type" flag to "git reset"
  + [mhf~2] "git fetch --force".
  + [mhf~3] Use .git/remote/origin, not .git/branches/origin.
  + [mhf~4] Make "git pull" and "git fetch" default to origin
  + [mhf~5] Infamous 'octopus merge'
  + [mhf~6] Retire git-parse-remote.
  + [mhf~7] Multi-head fetch.
  + [mhf~8] Start adding the $GIT_DIR/remotes/ support.
*++ [master] Add 'git show-branch'.

These three branches all forked from a common commit, [master], whose commit message is "Add 'git show-branch'". The "fixes" branch adds one commit "Introduce "reset type" flag to "git reset"". The "mhf" branch adds many other commits. The current branch is "master".

EXAMPLES

If you keep your primary branches immediately under refs/heads, and topic branches in subdirectories of it, having the following in the configuration file may help:

[showbranch]
        default = --topo-order
        default = heads/*

With this, git show-branch without extra parameters would show only the primary branches. In addition, if you happen to be on your topic branch, it is shown as well.

$ git show-branch --reflog="10,1 hour ago" --list master

shows 10 reflog entries going back from the tip as of 1 hour ago. Without --list, the output also shows how these tips are topologically related to each other.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

showBranch.default
The default set of branches for the section called “git-show-branch(1)”. See the section called “git-show-branch(1)”.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-show-index(1)

NAME

git-show-index - Show packed archive index

SYNOPSIS

git show-index [--object-format=<hash-algorithm>] < <pack-idx-file>

DESCRIPTION

Read the .idx file for a Git packfile (created with the section called “git-pack-objects(1)” or the section called “git-index-pack(1)”) from the standard input, and dump its contents. The output consists of one object per line, with each line containing two or three space-separated columns:

  • the first column is the offset in bytes of the object within the corresponding packfile
  • the second column is the object id of the object
  • if the index version is 2 or higher, the third column contains the CRC32 of the object data

The objects are output in the order in which they are found in the index file, which should be (in a correctly constructed file) sorted by object id.

Note that you can get more information on a packfile by calling the section called “git-verify-pack(1)”. However, as this command considers only the index file itself, it's both faster and more flexible.

OPTIONS

--object-format=<hash-algorithm>

Specify the given object format (hash algorithm) for the index file. The valid values are sha1 and (if enabled) sha256. The default is the algorithm for the current repository (set by extensions.objectFormat), or sha1 if no value is set or outside a repository..

Note: At present, there is no interoperability between SHA-256 repositories and SHA-1 repositories.

Historically, we warned that SHA-256 repositories may later need backward incompatible changes when we introduce such interoperability features. Today, we only expect compatible changes. Furthermore, if such changes prove to be necessary, it can be expected that SHA-256 repositories created with today's Git will be usable by future versions of Git without data loss.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-show-ref(1)

NAME

git-show-ref - List references in a local repository

SYNOPSIS

git show-ref [--head] [-d | --dereference]
             [-s | --hash[=<n>]] [--abbrev[=<n>]] [--branches] [--tags]
             [--] [<pattern>…]
git show-ref --verify [-q | --quiet] [-d | --dereference]
             [-s | --hash[=<n>]] [--abbrev[=<n>]]
             [--] [<ref>…]
git show-ref --exclude-existing[=<pattern>]
git show-ref --exists <ref>

DESCRIPTION

Displays references available in a local repository along with the associated commit IDs. Results can be filtered using a pattern and tags can be dereferenced into object IDs. Additionally, it can be used to test whether a particular ref exists.

By default, shows the tags, heads, and remote refs.

The --exclude-existing form is a filter that does the inverse. It reads refs from stdin, one ref per line, and shows those that don't exist in the local repository.

The --exists form can be used to check for the existence of a single references. This form does not verify whether the reference resolves to an actual object.

Use of this utility is encouraged in favor of directly accessing files under the .git directory.

OPTIONS

--head
Show the HEAD reference, even if it would normally be filtered out.
--branches , --tags
Limit to local branches and local tags, respectively. These options are not mutually exclusive; when given both, references stored in "refs/heads" and "refs/tags" are displayed. Note that --heads is a deprecated synonym for --branches and may be removed in the future.
-d , --dereference
Dereference tags into object IDs as well. They will be shown with ^{} appended.
-s , --hash[=<n>]
Only show the OID, not the reference name. When combined with --dereference, the dereferenced tag will still be shown after the OID.
--verify
Enable stricter reference checking by requiring an exact ref path. Aside from returning an error code of 1, it will also print an error message if --quiet was not specified.
--exists
Check whether the given reference exists. Returns an exit code of 0 if it does, 2 if it is missing, and 1 in case looking up the reference failed with an error other than the reference being missing.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Abbreviate the object name. When using --hash, you do not have to say --hash --abbrev; --hash=n would do.
-q , --quiet
Do not print any results to stdout. Can be used with --verify to silently check if a reference exists.
--exclude-existing[=<pattern>]
Make git show-ref act as a filter that reads refs from stdin of the form ^(?:<anything>\s)?<refname>(?:\^{})?$ and performs the following actions on each: (1) strip ^{} at the end of line if any; (2) ignore if pattern is provided and does not head-match refname; (3) warn if refname is not a well-formed refname and skip; (4) ignore if refname is a ref that exists in the local repository; (5) otherwise output the line.
<pattern>…
Show references matching one or more patterns. Patterns are matched from the end of the full name, and only complete parts are matched, e.g. master matches refs/heads/master, refs/remotes/origin/master, refs/tags/jedi/master but not refs/heads/mymaster or refs/remotes/master/jedi.

OUTPUT

The output is in the format:

<oid> SP <ref> LF

For example,

$ git show-ref --head --dereference
832e76a9899f560a90ffd62ae2ce83bbeff58f54 HEAD
832e76a9899f560a90ffd62ae2ce83bbeff58f54 refs/heads/master
832e76a9899f560a90ffd62ae2ce83bbeff58f54 refs/heads/origin
3521017556c5de4159da4615a39fa4d5d2c279b5 refs/tags/v0.99.9c
6ddc0964034342519a87fe013781abf31c6db6ad refs/tags/v0.99.9c^{}
055e4ae3ae6eb344cbabf2a5256a49ea66040131 refs/tags/v1.0rc4
423325a2d24638ddcc82ce47be5e40be550f4507 refs/tags/v1.0rc4^{}
...

When using --hash (and not --dereference), the output is in the format:

<oid> LF

For example,

$ git show-ref --branches --hash
2e3ba0114a1f52b47df29743d6915d056be13278
185008ae97960c8d551adcd9e23565194651b5d1
03adf42c988195b50e1a1935ba5fcbc39b2b029b
...

EXAMPLES

To show all references called "master", whether tags or heads or anything else, and regardless of how deep in the reference naming hierarchy they are, use:

        git show-ref master

This will show "refs/heads/master" but also "refs/remote/other-repo/master", if such references exist.

When using the --verify flag, the command requires an exact path:

        git show-ref --verify refs/heads/master

will only match the exact branch called "master".

If nothing matches, git show-ref will return an error code of 1, and in the case of verification, it will show an error message.

For scripting, you can ask it to be quiet with the --quiet flag, which allows you to do things like

        git show-ref --quiet --verify -- "refs/heads/$headname" ||
                echo "$headname is not a valid branch"

to check whether a particular branch exists or not (notice how we don't actually want to show any results, and we want to use the full refname for it in order to not trigger the problem with ambiguous partial matches).

To show only tags, or only proper branch heads, use --tags and/or --branches respectively (using both means that it shows tags and branches, but not other random references under the refs/ subdirectory).

To do automatic tag object dereferencing, use the -d or --dereference flag, so you can do

        git show-ref --tags --dereference

to get a listing of all tags together with what they dereference.

FILES

.git/refs/*, .git/packed-refs

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-show(1)

NAME

git-show - Show various types of objects

SYNOPSIS

git show [<options>] [<object>…]

DESCRIPTION

Shows one or more objects (blobs, trees, tags and commits).

For commits it shows the log message and textual diff. It also presents the merge commit in a special format as produced by git diff-tree --cc.

For tags, it shows the tag message and the referenced objects.

For trees, it shows the names (equivalent to git ls-tree with --name-only).

For plain blobs, it shows the plain contents.

Some options that git log command understands can be used to control how the changes the commit introduces are shown.

This manual page describes only the most frequently used options.

OPTIONS

<object>…
The names of objects to show (defaults to HEAD). For a more complete list of ways to spell object names, see "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in the section called “gitrevisions(7)”.
--pretty[=<format>] , --format=<format>

Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format:<string> and tformat:<string>. When <format> is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat:<format> were given.

See the "PRETTY FORMATS" section for some additional details for each format. When =<format> part is omitted, it defaults to medium.

Note: you can specify the default pretty format in the repository configuration (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--abbrev-commit

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name, show a prefix that names the object uniquely. "--abbrev=<n>" (which also modifies diff output, if it is displayed) option can be used to specify the minimum length of the prefix.

This should make "--pretty=oneline" a whole lot more readable for people using 80-column terminals.

--no-abbrev-commit
Show the full 40-byte hexadecimal commit object name. This negates --abbrev-commit, either explicit or implied by other options such as "--oneline". It also overrides the log.abbrevCommit variable.
--oneline
This is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit" used together.
--encoding=<encoding>
Commit objects record the character encoding used for the log message in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding preferred by the user. For non plumbing commands this defaults to UTF-8. Note that if an object claims to be encoded in X and we are outputting in X, we will output the object verbatim; this means that invalid sequences in the original commit may be copied to the output. Likewise, if iconv(3) fails to convert the commit, we will quietly output the original object verbatim.
--expand-tabs=<n> , --expand-tabs , --no-expand-tabs

Perform a tab expansion (replace each tab with enough spaces to fill to the next display column that is a multiple of <n>) in the log message before showing it in the output. --expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=8, and --no-expand-tabs is a short-hand for --expand-tabs=0, which disables tab expansion.

By default, tabs are expanded in pretty formats that indent the log message by 4 spaces (i.e. medium, which is the default, full, and fuller).

--notes[=<ref>]

Show the notes (see the section called “git-notes(1)”) that annotate the commit, when showing the commit log message. This is the default for git log, git show and git whatchanged commands when there is no --pretty, --format, or --oneline option given on the command line.

By default, the notes shown are from the notes refs listed in the core.notesRef and notes.displayRef variables (or corresponding environment overrides). See the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

With an optional <ref> argument, use the ref to find the notes to display. The ref can specify the full refname when it begins with refs/notes/; when it begins with notes/, refs/ and otherwise refs/notes/ is prefixed to form the full name of the ref.

Multiple --notes options can be combined to control which notes are being displayed. Examples: "--notes=foo" will show only notes from "refs/notes/foo"; "--notes=foo --notes" will show both notes from "refs/notes/foo" and from the default notes ref(s).

--no-notes
Do not show notes. This negates the above --notes option, by resetting the list of notes refs from which notes are shown. Options are parsed in the order given on the command line, so e.g. "--notes --notes=foo --no-notes --notes=bar" will only show notes from "refs/notes/bar".
--show-notes-by-default
Show the default notes unless options for displaying specific notes are given.
--show-notes[=<ref>] , --[no-]standard-notes
These options are deprecated. Use the above --notes/--no-notes options instead.
--show-signature
Check the validity of a signed commit object by passing the signature to gpg --verify and show the output.

PRETTY FORMATS

If the commit is a merge, and if the pretty-format is not oneline, email or raw, an additional line is inserted before the Author: line. This line begins with "Merge: " and the hashes of ancestral commits are printed, separated by spaces. Note that the listed commits may not necessarily be the list of the direct parent commits if you have limited your view of history: for example, if you are only interested in changes related to a certain directory or file.

There are several built-in formats, and you can define additional formats by setting a pretty.<name> config option to either another format name, or a format: string, as described below (see the section called “git-config(1)”). Here are the details of the built-in formats:

  • oneline

    <hash> <title-line>

    This is designed to be as compact as possible.

  • short

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    <title-line>
  • medium

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Date:   <author-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • full

    commit <hash>
    Author: <author>
    Commit: <committer>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • fuller

    commit <hash>
    Author:     <author>
    AuthorDate: <author-date>
    Commit:     <committer>
    CommitDate: <committer-date>
    <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • reference

    <abbrev-hash> (<title-line>, <short-author-date>)

    This format is used to refer to another commit in a commit message and is the same as --pretty='format:%C(auto)%h (%s, %ad)'. By default, the date is formatted with --date=short unless another --date option is explicitly specified. As with any format: with format placeholders, its output is not affected by other options like --decorate and --walk-reflogs.

  • email

    From <hash> <date>
    From: <author>
    Date: <author-date>
    Subject: [PATCH] <title-line>
    <full-commit-message>
  • mboxrd

    Like email, but lines in the commit message starting with "From " (preceded by zero or more ">") are quoted with ">" so they aren't confused as starting a new commit.

  • raw

    The raw format shows the entire commit exactly as stored in the commit object. Notably, the hashes are displayed in full, regardless of whether --abbrev or --no-abbrev are used, and parents information show the true parent commits, without taking grafts or history simplification into account. Note that this format affects the way commits are displayed, but not the way the diff is shown e.g. with git log --raw. To get full object names in a raw diff format, use --no-abbrev.

  • format:<format-string>

    The format:<format-string> format allows you to specify which information you want to show. It works a little bit like printf format, with the notable exception that you get a newline with %n instead of \n.

    E.g, format:"The author of %h was %an, %ar%nThe title was >>%s<<%n" would show something like this:

    The author of fe6e0ee was Junio C Hamano, 23 hours ago
    The title was >>t4119: test autocomputing -p<n> for traditional diff input.<<

    The placeholders are:

    • Placeholders that expand to a single literal character:

      %n
      newline
      %%
      a raw %
      %x00
      %x followed by two hexadecimal digits is replaced with a byte with the hexadecimal digits' value (we will call this "literal formatting code" in the rest of this document).
    • Placeholders that affect formatting of later placeholders:

      %Cred
      switch color to red
      %Cgreen
      switch color to green
      %Cblue
      switch color to blue
      %Creset
      reset color
      %C(…)
      color specification, as described under Values in the "CONFIGURATION FILE" section of the section called “git-config(1)”. By default, colors are shown only when enabled for log output (by color.diff, color.ui, or --color, and respecting the auto settings of the former if we are going to a terminal). %C(auto,...) is accepted as a historical synonym for the default (e.g., %C(auto,red)). Specifying %C(always,...) will show the colors even when color is not otherwise enabled (though consider just using --color=always to enable color for the whole output, including this format and anything else git might color). auto alone (i.e. %C(auto)) will turn on auto coloring on the next placeholders until the color is switched again.
      %m
      left (<), right (>) or boundary (-) mark
      %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]])
      switch line wrapping, like the -w option of the section called “git-shortlog(1)”.
      %<( <N> [,trunc|ltrunc|mtrunc])
      make the next placeholder take at least N column widths, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Optionally truncate (with ellipsis ..) at the left (ltrunc) ..ft, the middle (mtrunc) mi..le, or the end (trunc) rig.., if the output is longer than N columns. Note 1: that truncating only works correctly with N >= 2. Note 2: spaces around the N and M (see below) values are optional. Note 3: Emojis and other wide characters will take two display columns, which may over-run column boundaries. Note 4: decomposed character combining marks may be misplaced at padding boundaries.
      %<|( <M> )
      make the next placeholder take at least until Mth display column, padding spaces on the right if necessary. Use negative M values for column positions measured from the right hand edge of the terminal window.
      %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding spaces on the left
      %>>( <N> ), %>>|( <M> )
      similar to %>( <N> ), %>|( <M> ) respectively, except that if the next placeholder takes more spaces than given and there are spaces on its left, use those spaces
      %><( <N> ), %><|( <M> )
      similar to %<( <N> ), %<|( <M> ) respectively, but padding both sides (i.e. the text is centered)
    • Placeholders that expand to information extracted from the commit:

      %H
      commit hash
      %h
      abbreviated commit hash
      %T
      tree hash
      %t
      abbreviated tree hash
      %P
      parent hashes
      %p
      abbreviated parent hashes
      %an
      author name
      %aN
      author name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ae
      author email
      %aE
      author email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %al
      author email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %aL
      author local-part (see %al) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ad
      author date (format respects --date= option)
      %aD
      author date, RFC2822 style
      %ar
      author date, relative
      %at
      author date, UNIX timestamp
      %ai
      author date, ISO 8601-like format
      %aI
      author date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %as
      author date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ah
      author date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %cn
      committer name
      %cN
      committer name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ce
      committer email
      %cE
      committer email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cl
      committer email local-part (the part before the @ sign)
      %cL
      committer local-part (see %cl) respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %cd
      committer date (format respects --date= option)
      %cD
      committer date, RFC2822 style
      %cr
      committer date, relative
      %ct
      committer date, UNIX timestamp
      %ci
      committer date, ISO 8601-like format
      %cI
      committer date, strict ISO 8601 format
      %cs
      committer date, short format (YYYY-MM-DD)
      %ch
      committer date, human style (like the --date=human option of the section called “git-rev-list(1)”)
      %d
      ref names, like the --decorate option of the section called “git-log(1)”
      %D
      ref names without the " (", ")" wrapping.
      %(decorate[:<options>])

      ref names with custom decorations. The decorate string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Option values may contain literal formatting codes. These must be used for commas (%x2C) and closing parentheses (%x29), due to their role in the option syntax.

      • prefix=<value>: Shown before the list of ref names. Defaults to " (".
      • suffix=<value>: Shown after the list of ref names. Defaults to ")".
      • separator=<value>: Shown between ref names. Defaults to ", ".
      • pointer=<value>: Shown between HEAD and the branch it points to, if any. Defaults to " -> ".
      • tag=<value>: Shown before tag names. Defaults to "tag: ".

      For example, to produce decorations with no wrapping or tag annotations, and spaces as separators:

      %(decorate:prefix=,suffix=,tag=,separator= )

      %(describe[:<options>])

      human-readable name, like the section called “git-describe(1)”; empty string for undescribable commits. The describe string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. Descriptions can be inconsistent when tags are added or removed at the same time.

      • tags[=<bool-value>]: Instead of only considering annotated tags, consider lightweight tags as well.
      • abbrev=<number>: Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits (which will vary according to the number of objects in the repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object name, use <number> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a unique object name.
      • match=<pattern>: Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      • exclude=<pattern>: Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern, excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix.
      %S
      ref name given on the command line by which the commit was reached (like git log --source), only works with git log
      %e
      encoding
      %s
      subject
      %f
      sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
      %b
      body
      %B
      raw body (unwrapped subject and body)
      %N
      commit notes
      %GG
      raw verification message from GPG for a signed commit
      %G?
      show "G" for a good (valid) signature, "B" for a bad signature, "U" for a good signature with unknown validity, "X" for a good signature that has expired, "Y" for a good signature made by an expired key, "R" for a good signature made by a revoked key, "E" if the signature cannot be checked (e.g. missing key) and "N" for no signature
      %GS
      show the name of the signer for a signed commit
      %GK
      show the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GF
      show the fingerprint of the key used to sign a signed commit
      %GP
      show the fingerprint of the primary key whose subkey was used to sign a signed commit
      %GT
      show the trust level for the key used to sign a signed commit
      %gD
      reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1} or refs/stash@{2 minutes ago}; the format follows the rules described for the -g option. The portion before the @ is the refname as given on the command line (so git log -g refs/heads/master would yield refs/heads/master@{0}).
      %gd
      shortened reflog selector; same as %gD, but the refname portion is shortened for human readability (so refs/heads/master becomes just master).
      %gn
      reflog identity name
      %gN
      reflog identity name (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %ge
      reflog identity email
      %gE
      reflog identity email (respecting .mailmap, see the section called “git-shortlog(1)” or the section called “git-blame(1)”)
      %gs
      reflog subject
      %(trailers[:<options>])

      display the trailers of the body as interpreted by the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”. The trailers string may be followed by a colon and zero or more comma-separated options. If any option is provided multiple times, the last occurrence wins.

      • key=<key>: only show trailers with specified <key>. Matching is done case-insensitively and trailing colon is optional. If option is given multiple times trailer lines matching any of the keys are shown. This option automatically enables the only option so that non-trailer lines in the trailer block are hidden. If that is not desired it can be disabled with only=false. E.g., %(trailers:key=Reviewed-by) shows trailer lines with key Reviewed-by.
      • only[=<bool>]: select whether non-trailer lines from the trailer block should be included.
      • separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between trailer lines. Defaults to a line feed character. The string <sep> may contain the literal formatting codes described above. To use comma as separator one must use %x2C as it would otherwise be parsed as next option. E.g., %(trailers:key=Ticket,separator=%x2C ) shows all trailer lines whose key is "Ticket" separated by a comma and a space.
      • unfold[=<bool>]: make it behave as if interpret-trailer's --unfold option was given. E.g., %(trailers:only,unfold=true) unfolds and shows all trailer lines.
      • keyonly[=<bool>]: only show the key part of the trailer.
      • valueonly[=<bool>]: only show the value part of the trailer.
      • key_value_separator=<sep>: specify the separator inserted between the key and value of each trailer. Defaults to ": ". Otherwise it shares the same semantics as separator=<sep> above.

Note

Some placeholders may depend on other options given to the revision traversal engine. For example, the %g* reflog options will insert an empty string unless we are traversing reflog entries (e.g., by git log -g). The %d and %D placeholders will use the "short" decoration format if --decorate was not already provided on the command line.

The boolean options accept an optional value [=<bool-value>]. The values taken by --type=bool git-config[1], like yes and off, are all accepted. Giving a boolean option without =<value> is equivalent to giving it with =true.

If you add a + (plus sign) after % of a placeholder, a line-feed is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

If you add a - (minus sign) after % of a placeholder, all consecutive line-feeds immediately preceding the expansion are deleted if and only if the placeholder expands to an empty string.

If you add a ` ` (space) after % of a placeholder, a space is inserted immediately before the expansion if and only if the placeholder expands to a non-empty string.

  • tformat:

    The tformat: format works exactly like format:, except that it provides "terminator" semantics instead of "separator" semantics. In other words, each commit has the message terminator character (usually a newline) appended, rather than a separator placed between entries. This means that the final entry of a single-line format will be properly terminated with a new line, just as the "oneline" format does. For example:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=format:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973 -- NO NEWLINE
    
    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef \
      | perl -pe '$_ .= " -- NO NEWLINE\n" unless /\n/'
    4da45be
    7134973

    In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it. For example, these two are equivalent:

    $ git log -2 --pretty=tformat:%h 4da45bef
    $ git log -2 --pretty=%h 4da45bef

DIFF FORMATTING

The options below can be used to change the way git show generates diff output.

-p , -u , --patch
Generate patch (see the section called “Generating patch text with -p”).
-s , --no-patch
Suppress all output from the diff machinery. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default to squelch their output, or to cancel the effect of options like --patch, --stat earlier on the command line in an alias.
-m
Show diffs for merge commits in the default format. This is similar to --diff-merges=on, except -m will produce no output unless -p is given as well.
-c
Produce combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=combined -p.
--cc
Produce dense combined diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=dense-combined -p.
--dd
Produce diff with respect to first parent for both merge and regular commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=first-parent -p.
--remerge-diff
Produce remerge-diff output for merge commits. Shortcut for --diff-merges=remerge -p.
--no-diff-merges
Synonym for --diff-merges=off.
--diff-merges=<format>

Specify diff format to be used for merge commits. Default is dense-combined unless --first-parent is in use, in which case first-parent is the default.

The following formats are supported:

off, none
Disable output of diffs for merge commits. Useful to override implied value.
on, m
Make diff output for merge commits to be shown in the default format. The default format can be changed using log.diffMerges configuration variable, whose default value is separate.
first-parent, 1
Show full diff with respect to first parent. This is the same format as --patch produces for non-merge commits.
separate
Show full diff with respect to each of parents. Separate log entry and diff is generated for each parent.
combined, c
Show differences from each of the parents to the merge result simultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff between a parent and the result one at a time. Furthermore, it lists only files which were modified from all parents.
dense-combined, cc
Further compress output produced by --diff-merges=combined by omitting uninteresting hunks whose contents in the parents have only two variants and the merge result picks one of them without modification.
remerge, r

Remerge two-parent merge commits to create a temporary tree object--potentially containing files with conflict markers and such. A diff is then shown between that temporary tree and the actual merge commit.

The output emitted when this option is used is subject to change, and so is its interaction with other options (unless explicitly documented).

--combined-all-paths
Cause combined diffs (used for merge commits) to list the name of the file from all parents. It thus only has effect when --diff-merges=[dense-]combined is in use, and is likely only useful if filename changes are detected (i.e. when either rename or copy detection have been requested).
-U<n> , --unified=<n>
Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three. Implies --patch.
--output=<file>
Output to a specific file instead of stdout.
--output-indicator-new=<char> , --output-indicator-old=<char> , --output-indicator-context=<char>
Specify the character used to indicate new, old or context lines in the generated patch. Normally they are +, - and ' ' respectively.
--raw
For each commit, show a summary of changes using the raw diff format. See the "RAW OUTPUT FORMAT" section of the section called “git-diff(1)”. This is different from showing the log itself in raw format, which you can achieve with --format=raw.
--patch-with-raw
Synonym for -p --raw.
-t
Show the tree objects in the diff output.
--indent-heuristic
Enable the heuristic that shifts diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read. This is the default.
--no-indent-heuristic
Disable the indent heuristic.
--minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
--patience
Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.
--histogram
Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.
--anchored=<text>

Generate a diff using the "anchored diff" algorithm.

This option may be specified more than once.

If a line exists in both the source and destination, exists only once, and starts with <text>, this algorithm attempts to prevent it from appearing as a deletion or addition in the output. It uses the "patience diff" algorithm internally.

--diff-algorithm=(patience|minimal|histogram|myers)

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default , myers
The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal
Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience
Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram
This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

For instance, if you configured the diff.algorithm variable to a non-default value and want to use the default one, then you have to use --diff-algorithm=default option.

--stat[=<width>[,<name-width>[,<count>]]]

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma or by setting diff.statNameWidth=<name-width>. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<graph-width> or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<graph-width>. Using --stat or --stat-graph-width affects all commands generating a stat graph, while setting diff.statNameWidth or diff.statGraphWidth does not affect git format-patch. By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

These parameters can also be set individually with --stat-width=<width>, --stat-name-width=<name-width> and --stat-count=<count>.

--compact-summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as file creations or deletions ("new" or "gone", optionally +l if it's a symlink) and mode changes (+x or -x for adding or removing executable bit respectively) in diffstat. The information is put between the filename part and the graph part. Implies --stat.
--numstat
Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.
--shortstat
Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.
-X [<param>,...] , --dirstat[=<param>,...]

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). The following parameters are available:

changes
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines
Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files
Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative
Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>
An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: --dirstat=files,10,cumulative.

--cumulative
Synonym for --dirstat=cumulative.
--dirstat-by-file[=<param>,...]
Synonym for --dirstat=files,<param>,....
--summary
Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.
--patch-with-stat
Synonym for -p --stat.
-z

Separate the commits with NULs instead of newlines.

Also, when --raw or --numstat has been given, do not munge pathnames and use NULs as output field terminators.

Without this option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

--name-only
Show only the name of each changed file in the post-image tree. The file names are often encoded in UTF-8. For more information see the discussion about encoding in the the section called “git-log(1)” manual page.
--name-status
Show only the name(s) and status of each changed file. See the description of the --diff-filter option on what the status letters mean. Just like --name-only the file names are often encoded in UTF-8.
--submodule[=<format>]
Specify how differences in submodules are shown. When specifying --submodule=short the short format is used. This format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. When --submodule or --submodule=log is specified, the log format is used. This format lists the commits in the range like the section called “git-submodule(1)” summary does. When --submodule=diff is specified, the diff format is used. This format shows an inline diff of the changes in the submodule contents between the commit range. Defaults to diff.submodule or the short format if the config option is unset.
--color[=<when>]
Show colored diff. --color (i.e. without =<when>) is the same as --color=always. <when> can be one of always, never, or auto.
--no-color
Turn off colored diff. It is the same as --color=never.
--color-moved[=<mode>]

Moved lines of code are colored differently. The <mode> defaults to no if the option is not given and to zebra if the option with no mode is given. The mode must be one of:

no
Moved lines are not highlighted.
default
Is a synonym for zebra. This may change to a more sensible mode in the future.
plain
Any line that is added in one location and was removed in another location will be colored with color.diff.newMoved. Similarly color.diff.oldMoved will be used for removed lines that are added somewhere else in the diff. This mode picks up any moved line, but it is not very useful in a review to determine if a block of code was moved without permutation.
blocks
Blocks of moved text of at least 20 alphanumeric characters are detected greedily. The detected blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color. Adjacent blocks cannot be told apart.
zebra
Blocks of moved text are detected as in blocks mode. The blocks are painted using either the color.diff.(old|new)Moved color or color.diff.(old|new)MovedAlternative. The change between the two colors indicates that a new block was detected.
dimmed-zebra
Similar to zebra, but additional dimming of uninteresting parts of moved code is performed. The bordering lines of two adjacent blocks are considered interesting, the rest is uninteresting. dimmed_zebra is a deprecated synonym.
--no-color-moved
Turn off move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved=no.
--color-moved-ws=<mode>,...

This configures how whitespace is ignored when performing the move detection for --color-moved. These modes can be given as a comma separated list:

no
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection.
ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
allow-indentation-change
Initially ignore any whitespace in the move detection, then group the moved code blocks only into a block if the change in whitespace is the same per line. This is incompatible with the other modes.
--no-color-moved-ws
Do not ignore whitespace when performing move detection. This can be used to override configuration settings. It is the same as --color-moved-ws=no.
--word-diff[=<mode>]

By default, words are delimited by whitespace; see --word-diff-regex below. The <mode> defaults to plain, and must be one of:

color
Highlight changed words using only colors. Implies --color.
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {added}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous.
porcelain
Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own.
none
Disable word diff again.

Note that despite the name of the first mode, color is used to highlight the changed parts in all modes if enabled.

--word-diff-regex=<regex>

Use <regex> to decide what a word is, instead of considering runs of non-whitespace to be a word. Also implies --word-diff unless it was already enabled.

Every non-overlapping match of the <regex> is considered a word. Anything between these matches is considered whitespace and ignored(!) for the purposes of finding differences. You may want to append |[^[:space:]] to your regular expression to make sure that it matches all non-whitespace characters. A match that contains a newline is silently truncated(!) at the newline.

For example, --word-diff-regex=. will treat each character as a word and, correspondingly, show differences character by character.

The regex can also be set via a diff driver or configuration option, see the section called “gitattributes(5)” or the section called “git-config(1)”. Giving it explicitly overrides any diff driver or configuration setting. Diff drivers override configuration settings.

--color-words[=<regex>]
Equivalent to --word-diff=color plus (if a regex was specified) --word-diff-regex=<regex>.
--no-renames
Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.
--[no-]rename-empty
Whether to use empty blobs as rename source.
--check
Warn if changes introduce conflict markers or whitespace errors. What are considered whitespace errors is controlled by core.whitespace configuration. By default, trailing whitespaces (including lines that consist solely of whitespaces) and a space character that is immediately followed by a tab character inside the initial indent of the line are considered whitespace errors. Exits with non-zero status if problems are found. Not compatible with --exit-code.
--ws-error-highlight=<kind>
Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. When this option is not given, and the configuration variable diff.wsErrorHighlight is not set, only whitespace errors in new lines are highlighted. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace.
--full-index
Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.
--binary
In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply. Implies --patch.
--abbrev[=<n>]
Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show the shortest prefix that is at least <n> hexdigits long that uniquely refers the object. In diff-patch output format, --full-index takes higher precedence, i.e. if --full-index is specified, full blob names will be shown regardless of --abbrev. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.
-B[<n>][/<m>] , --break-rewrites[=[<n>][/<m>]]

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

It affects the way a change that amounts to a total rewrite of a file not as a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with a very few lines that happen to match textually as the context, but as a single deletion of everything old followed by a single insertion of everything new, and the number <m> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 60%). -B/70% specifies that less than 30% of the original should remain in the result for Git to consider it a total rewrite (i.e. otherwise the resulting patch will be a series of deletion and insertion mixed together with context lines).

When used with -M, a totally-rewritten file is also considered as the source of a rename (usually -M only considers a file that disappeared as the source of a rename), and the number <n> controls this aspect of the -B option (defaults to 50%). -B20% specifies that a change with addition and deletion compared to 20% or more of the file's size are eligible for being picked up as a possible source of a rename to another file.

-M[<n>] , --find-renames[=<n>]
If generating diffs, detect and report renames for each commit. For following files across renames while traversing history, see --follow. If <n> is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file's size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn't changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.
-C[<n>] , --find-copies[=<n>]
Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If <n> is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.
--find-copies-harder
For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.
-D , --irreversible-delete

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lacks enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

When used together with -B, omit also the preimage in the deletion part of a delete/create pair.

-l<num>
The -M and -C options involve some preliminary steps that can detect subsets of renames/copies cheaply, followed by an exhaustive fallback portion that compares all remaining unpaired destinations to all relevant sources. (For renames, only remaining unpaired sources are relevant; for copies, all original sources are relevant.) For N sources and destinations, this exhaustive check is O(N^2). This option prevents the exhaustive portion of rename/copy detection from running if the number of source/destination files involved exceeds the specified number. Defaults to diff.renameLimit. Note that a value of 0 is treated as unlimited.
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]]

Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule, …) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.

Also, these upper-case letters can be downcased to exclude. E.g. --diff-filter=ad excludes added and deleted paths.

Note that not all diffs can feature all types. For instance, copied and renamed entries cannot appear if detection for those types is disabled.

-S<string>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified <string> (i.e. addition/deletion) in a file. Intended for the scripter's use.

It is useful when you're looking for an exact block of code (like a struct), and want to know the history of that block since it first came into being: use the feature iteratively to feed the interesting block in the preimage back into -S, and keep going until you get the very first version of the block.

Binary files are searched as well.

-G<regex>

Look for differences whose patch text contains added/removed lines that match <regex>.

To illustrate the difference between -S<regex> --pickaxe-regex and -G<regex>, consider a commit with the following diff in the same file:

+    return frotz(nitfol, two->ptr, 1, 0);
...
-    hit = frotz(nitfol, mf2.ptr, 1, 0);

While git log -G"frotz\(nitfol" will show this commit, git log -S"frotz\(nitfol" --pickaxe-regex will not (because the number of occurrences of that string did not change).

Unless --text is supplied patches of binary files without a textconv filter will be ignored.

See the pickaxe entry in the section called “gitdiffcore(7)” for more information.

--find-object=<object-id>

Look for differences that change the number of occurrences of the specified object. Similar to -S, just the argument is different in that it doesn't search for a specific string but for a specific object id.

The object can be a blob or a submodule commit. It implies the -t option in git-log to also find trees.

--pickaxe-all
When -S or -G finds a change, show all the changes in that changeset, not just the files that contain the change in <string>.
--pickaxe-regex
Treat the <string> given to -S as an extended POSIX regular expression to match.
-O<orderfile>

Control the order in which files appear in the output. This overrides the diff.orderFile configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). To cancel diff.orderFile, use -O/dev/null.

The output order is determined by the order of glob patterns in <orderfile>. All files with pathnames that match the first pattern are output first, all files with pathnames that match the second pattern (but not the first) are output next, and so on. All files with pathnames that do not match any pattern are output last, as if there was an implicit match-all pattern at the end of the file. If multiple pathnames have the same rank (they match the same pattern but no earlier patterns), their output order relative to each other is the normal order.

<orderfile> is parsed as follows:

  • Blank lines are ignored, so they can be used as separators for readability.
  • Lines starting with a hash ("#") are ignored, so they can be used for comments. Add a backslash ("\") to the beginning of the pattern if it starts with a hash.
  • Each other line contains a single pattern.

Patterns have the same syntax and semantics as patterns used for fnmatch(3) without the FNM_PATHNAME flag, except a pathname also matches a pattern if removing any number of the final pathname components matches the pattern. For example, the pattern "foo*bar" matches "fooasdfbar" and "foo/bar/baz/asdf" but not "foobarx".

--skip-to=<file> , --rotate-to=<file>
Discard the files before the named <file> from the output (i.e. skip to), or move them to the end of the output (i.e. rotate to). These options were invented primarily for the use of the git difftool command, and may not be very useful otherwise.
-R
Swap two inputs; that is, show differences from index or on-disk file to tree contents.
--relative[=<path>] , --no-relative
When run from a subdirectory of the project, it can be told to exclude changes outside the directory and show pathnames relative to it with this option. When you are not in a subdirectory (e.g. in a bare repository), you can name which subdirectory to make the output relative to by giving a <path> as an argument. --no-relative can be used to countermand both diff.relative config option and previous --relative.
-a , --text
Treat all files as text.
--ignore-cr-at-eol
Ignore carriage-return at the end of line when doing a comparison.
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b , --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w , --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.
--ignore-blank-lines
Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.
-I<regex> , --ignore-matching-lines=<regex>
Ignore changes whose all lines match <regex>. This option may be specified more than once.
--inter-hunk-context=<number>
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset.
-W , --function-context
Show whole function as context lines for each change. The function names are determined in the same way as git diff works out patch hunk headers (see "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)”).
--ext-diff
Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with the section called “gitattributes(5)”, you need to use this option with the section called “git-log(1)” and friends.
--no-ext-diff
Disallow external diff drivers.
--textconv , --no-textconv
Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for the section called “git-diff(1)” and the section called “git-log(1)”, but not for the section called “git-format-patch(1)” or diff plumbing commands.
--ignore-submodules[=(none|untracked|dirty|all)]
Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. all is the default. Using none will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When untracked is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using dirty ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using all hides all changes to submodules.
--src-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given source <prefix> instead of "a/".
--dst-prefix=<prefix>
Show the given destination <prefix> instead of "b/".
--no-prefix
Do not show any source or destination prefix.
--default-prefix
Use the default source and destination prefixes ("a/" and "b/"). This overrides configuration variables such as diff.noprefix, diff.srcPrefix, diff.dstPrefix, and diff.mnemonicPrefix (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
--line-prefix=<prefix>
Prepend an additional <prefix> to every line of output.
--ita-invisible-in-index
By default entries added by git add -N appear as an existing empty file in git diff and a new file in git diff --cached. This option makes the entry appear as a new file in git diff and non-existent in git diff --cached. This option could be reverted with --ita-visible-in-index. Both options are experimental and could be removed in future.

For more detailed explanation on these common options, see also the section called “gitdiffcore(7)”.

Generating patch text with -p

Running the section called “git-diff(1)”, the section called “git-log(1)”, the section called “git-show(1)”, the section called “git-diff-index(1)”, the section called “git-diff-tree(1)”, or the section called “git-diff-files(1)” with the -p option produces patch text. You can customize the creation of patch text via the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables (see the section called “git(1)”), and the diff attribute (see the section called “gitattributes(5)”).

What the -p option produces is slightly different from the traditional diff format:

  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header that looks like this:

    diff --git a/file1 b/file2

    The a/ and b/ filenames are the same unless rename/copy is involved. Especially, even for a creation or a deletion, /dev/null is not used in place of the a/ or b/ filenames.

    When a rename/copy is involved, file1 and file2 show the name of the source file of the rename/copy and the name of the file that the rename/copy produces, respectively.

  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines:

    old mode <mode>
    new mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    copy from <path>
    copy to <path>
    rename from <path>
    rename to <path>
    similarity index <number>
    dissimilarity index <number>
    index <hash>..<hash> <mode>

    File modes <mode> are printed as 6-digit octal numbers including the file type and file permission bits.

    Path names in extended headers do not include the a/ and b/ prefixes.

    The similarity index is the percentage of unchanged lines, and the dissimilarity index is the percentage of changed lines. It is a rounded down integer, followed by a percent sign. The similarity index value of 100% is thus reserved for two equal files, while 100% dissimilarity means that no line from the old file made it into the new one.

    The index line includes the blob object names before and after the change. The <mode> is included if the file mode does not change; otherwise, separate lines indicate the old and the new mode.

  3. Pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).
  4. All the file1 files in the output refer to files before the commit, and all the file2 files refer to files after the commit. It is incorrect to apply each change to each file sequentially. For example, this patch will swap a and b:

    diff --git a/a b/b
    rename from a
    rename to b
    diff --git a/b b/a
    rename from b
    rename to a
  5. Hunk headers mention the name of the function to which the hunk applies. See "Defining a custom hunk-header" in the section called “gitattributes(5)” for details of how to tailor this to specific languages.

Combined diff format

Any diff-generating command can take the -c or --cc option to produce a combined diff when showing a merge. This is the default format when showing merges with the section called “git-diff(1)” or the section called “git-show(1)”. Note also that you can give suitable --diff-merges option to any of these commands to force generation of diffs in a specific format.

A "combined diff" format looks like this:

diff --combined describe.c
index fabadb8,cc95eb0..4866510
--- a/describe.c
+++ b/describe.c
@@@ -98,20 -98,12 +98,20 @@@
        return (a_date > b_date) ? -1 : (a_date == b_date) ? 0 : 1;
  }

- static void describe(char *arg)
 -static void describe(struct commit *cmit, int last_one)
++static void describe(char *arg, int last_one)
  {
 +      unsigned char sha1[20];
 +      struct commit *cmit;
        struct commit_list *list;
        static int initialized = 0;
        struct commit_name *n;

 +      if (get_sha1(arg, sha1) < 0)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +      cmit = lookup_commit_reference(sha1);
 +      if (!cmit)
 +              usage(describe_usage);
 +
        if (!initialized) {
                initialized = 1;
                for_each_ref(get_name);
  1. It is preceded by a "git diff" header, that looks like this (when the -c option is used):

    diff --combined file

    or like this (when the --cc option is used):

    diff --cc file
  2. It is followed by one or more extended header lines (this example shows a merge with two parents):

    index <hash>,<hash>..<hash>
    mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode>
    new file mode <mode>
    deleted file mode <mode>,<mode>

    The mode <mode>,<mode>..<mode> line appears only if at least one of the <mode> is different from the rest. Extended headers with information about detected content movement (renames and copying detection) are designed to work with the diff of two <tree-ish> and are not used by combined diff format.

  3. It is followed by a two-line from-file/to-file header:

    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    Similar to the two-line header for the traditional unified diff format, /dev/null is used to signal created or deleted files.

    However, if the --combined-all-paths option is provided, instead of a two-line from-file/to-file, you get an N+1 line from-file/to-file header, where N is the number of parents in the merge commit:

    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    --- a/file
    +++ b/file

    This extended format can be useful if rename or copy detection is active, to allow you to see the original name of the file in different parents.

  4. Chunk header format is modified to prevent people from accidentally feeding it to patch -p1. Combined diff format was created for review of merge commit changes, and was not meant to be applied. The change is similar to the change in the extended index header:

    @@@ <from-file-range> <from-file-range> <to-file-range> @@@

    There are (number of parents + 1) @ characters in the chunk header for combined diff format.

Unlike the traditional unified diff format, which shows two files A and B with a single column that has - (minus -- appears in A but removed in B), + (plus -- missing in A but added to B), or " " (space -- unchanged) prefix, this format compares two or more files file1, file2,… with one file X, and shows how X differs from each of fileN. One column for each of fileN is prepended to the output line to note how X's line is different from it.

A - character in the column N means that the line appears in fileN but it does not appear in the result. A + character in the column N means that the line appears in the result, and fileN does not have that line (in other words, the line was added, from the point of view of that parent).

In the above example output, the function signature was changed from both files (hence two - removals from both file1 and file2, plus ++ to mean one line that was added does not appear in either file1 or file2). Also, eight other lines are the same from file1 but do not appear in file2 (hence prefixed with +).

When shown by git diff-tree -c, it compares the parents of a merge commit with the merge result (i.e. file1..fileN are the parents). When shown by git diff-files -c, it compares the two unresolved merge parents with the working tree file (i.e. file1 is stage 2 aka "our version", file2 is stage 3 aka "their version").

EXAMPLES

git show v1.0.0
Shows the tag v1.0.0, along with the object the tag points at.
git show v1.0.0^{tree}
Shows the tree pointed to by the tag v1.0.0.
git show -s --format=%s v1.0.0^{commit}
Shows the subject of the commit pointed to by the tag v1.0.0.
git show next~10:Documentation/README
Shows the contents of the file Documentation/README as they were current in the 10th last commit of the branch next.
git show master:Makefile master:t/Makefile
Concatenates the contents of said Makefiles in the head of the branch master.

DISCUSSION

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

  • The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
  • Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/config (see the section called “git-config(1)”), the section called “gitignore(5)”, the section called “gitattributes(5)” and the section called “gitmodules(5)”).

    Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

  • Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:

    [i18n]
            logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

    If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-sparse-checkout(1)

NAME

git-sparse-checkout - Reduce your working tree to a subset of tracked files

SYNOPSIS

git sparse-checkout (init | list | set | add | reapply | disable | check-rules) [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

This command is used to create sparse checkouts, which change the working tree from having all tracked files present to only having a subset of those files. It can also switch which subset of files are present, or undo and go back to having all tracked files present in the working copy.

The subset of files is chosen by providing a list of directories in cone mode (the default), or by providing a list of patterns in non-cone mode.

When in a sparse-checkout, other Git commands behave a bit differently. For example, switching branches will not update paths outside the sparse-checkout directories/patterns, and git commit -a will not record paths outside the sparse-checkout directories/patterns as deleted.

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. ITS BEHAVIOR, AND THE BEHAVIOR OF OTHER COMMANDS IN THE PRESENCE OF SPARSE-CHECKOUTS, WILL LIKELY CHANGE IN THE FUTURE.

COMMANDS

list
Describe the directories or patterns in the sparse-checkout file.
set

Enable the necessary sparse-checkout config settings (core.sparseCheckout, core.sparseCheckoutCone, and index.sparse) if they are not already set to the desired values, populate the sparse-checkout file from the list of arguments following the set subcommand, and update the working directory to match.

To ensure that adjusting the sparse-checkout settings within a worktree does not alter the sparse-checkout settings in other worktrees, the set subcommand will upgrade your repository config to use worktree-specific config if not already present. The sparsity defined by the arguments to the set subcommand are stored in the worktree-specific sparse-checkout file. See the section called “git-worktree(1)” and the documentation of extensions.worktreeConfig in the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

When the --stdin option is provided, the directories or patterns are read from standard in as a newline-delimited list instead of from the arguments.

By default, the input list is considered a list of directories, matching the output of git ls-tree -d --name-only. This includes interpreting pathnames that begin with a double quote (") as C-style quoted strings. Note that all files under the specified directories (at any depth) will be included in the sparse checkout, as well as files that are siblings of either the given directory or any of its ancestors (see CONE PATTERN SET below for more details). In the past, this was not the default, and --cone needed to be specified or core.sparseCheckoutCone needed to be enabled.

When --no-cone is passed, the input list is considered a list of patterns. This mode has a number of drawbacks, including not working with some options like --sparse-index. As explained in the "Non-cone Problems" section below, we do not recommend using it.

Use the --[no-]sparse-index option to use a sparse index (the default is to not use it). A sparse index reduces the size of the index to be more closely aligned with your sparse-checkout definition. This can have significant performance advantages for commands such as git status or git add. This feature is still experimental. Some commands might be slower with a sparse index until they are properly integrated with the feature.

WARNING: Using a sparse index requires modifying the index in a way that is not completely understood by external tools. If you have trouble with this compatibility, then run git sparse-checkout init --no-sparse-index to rewrite your index to not be sparse. Older versions of Git will not understand the sparse directory entries index extension and may fail to interact with your repository until it is disabled.

add
Update the sparse-checkout file to include additional directories (in cone mode) or patterns (in non-cone mode). By default, these directories or patterns are read from the command-line arguments, but they can be read from stdin using the --stdin option.
reapply

Reapply the sparsity pattern rules to paths in the working tree. Commands like merge or rebase can materialize paths to do their work (e.g. in order to show you a conflict), and other sparse-checkout commands might fail to sparsify an individual file (e.g. because it has unstaged changes or conflicts). In such cases, it can make sense to run git sparse-checkout reapply later after cleaning up affected paths (e.g. resolving conflicts, undoing or committing changes, etc.).

The reapply command can also take --[no-]cone and --[no-]sparse-index flags, with the same meaning as the flags from the set command, in order to change which sparsity mode you are using without needing to also respecify all sparsity paths.

disable
Disable the core.sparseCheckout config setting, and restore the working directory to include all files.
init

Deprecated command that behaves like set with no specified paths. May be removed in the future.

Historically, set did not handle all the necessary config settings, which meant that both init and set had to be called. Invoking both meant the init step would first remove nearly all tracked files (and in cone mode, ignored files too), then the set step would add many of the tracked files (but not ignored files) back. In addition to the lost files, the performance and UI of this combination was poor.

Also, historically, init would not actually initialize the sparse-checkout file if it already existed. This meant it was possible to return to a sparse-checkout without remembering which paths to pass to a subsequent set or add command. However, --cone and --sparse-index options would not be remembered across the disable command, so the easy restore of calling a plain init decreased in utility.

check-rules

Check whether sparsity rules match one or more paths.

By default check-rules reads a list of paths from stdin and outputs only the ones that match the current sparsity rules. The input is expected to consist of one path per line, matching the output of git ls-tree --name-only including that pathnames that begin with a double quote (") are interpreted as C-style quoted strings.

When called with the --rules-file <file> flag the input files are matched against the sparse checkout rules found in <file> instead of the current ones. The rules in the files are expected to be in the same form as accepted by git sparse-checkout set --stdin (in particular, they must be newline-delimited).

By default, the rules passed to the --rules-file option are interpreted as cone mode directories. To pass non-cone mode patterns with --rules-file, combine the option with the --no-cone option.

When called with the -z flag, the format of the paths input on stdin as well as the output paths are \0 terminated and not quoted. Note that this does not apply to the format of the rules passed with the --rules-file option.

EXAMPLES

git sparse-checkout set MY/DIR1 SUB/DIR2
Change to a sparse checkout with all files (at any depth) under MY/DIR1/ and SUB/DIR2/ present in the working copy (plus all files immediately under MY/ and SUB/ and the toplevel directory). If already in a sparse checkout, change which files are present in the working copy to this new selection. Note that this command will also delete all ignored files in any directory that no longer has either tracked or non-ignored-untracked files present.
git sparse-checkout disable
Repopulate the working directory with all files, disabling sparse checkouts.
git sparse-checkout add SOME/DIR/ECTORY
Add all files under SOME/DIR/ECTORY/ (at any depth) to the sparse checkout, as well as all files immediately under SOME/DIR/ and immediately under SOME/. Must already be in a sparse checkout before using this command.
git sparse-checkout reapply
It is possible for commands to update the working tree in a way that does not respect the selected sparsity directories. This can come from tools external to Git writing files, or even affect Git commands because of either special cases (such as hitting conflicts when merging/rebasing), or because some commands didn't fully support sparse checkouts (e.g. the old recursive merge backend had only limited support). This command reapplies the existing sparse directory specifications to make the working directory match.

INTERNALS -- SPARSE CHECKOUT

"Sparse checkout" allows populating the working directory sparsely. It uses the skip-worktree bit (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”) to tell Git whether a file in the working directory is worth looking at. If the skip-worktree bit is set, and the file is not present in the working tree, then its absence is ignored. Git will avoid populating the contents of those files, which makes a sparse checkout helpful when working in a repository with many files, but only a few are important to the current user.

The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file is used to define the skip-worktree reference bitmap. When Git updates the working directory, it updates the skip-worktree bits in the index based on this file. The files matching the patterns in the file will appear in the working directory, and the rest will not.

INTERNALS -- NON-CONE PROBLEMS

The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file populated by the set and add subcommands is defined to be a bunch of patterns (one per line) using the same syntax as .gitignore files. In cone mode, these patterns are restricted to matching directories (and users only ever need supply or see directory names), while in non-cone mode any gitignore-style pattern is permitted. Using the full gitignore-style patterns in non-cone mode has a number of shortcomings:

  • Fundamentally, it makes various worktree-updating processes (pull, merge, rebase, switch, reset, checkout, etc.) require O(N*M) pattern matches, where N is the number of patterns and M is the number of paths in the index. This scales poorly.
  • Avoiding the scaling issue has to be done via limiting the number of patterns via specifying leading directory name or glob.
  • Passing globs on the command line is error-prone as users may forget to quote the glob, causing the shell to expand it into all matching files and pass them all individually along to sparse-checkout set/add. While this could also be a problem with e.g. "git grep -- *.c", mistakes with grep/log/status appear in the immediate output. With sparse-checkout, the mistake gets recorded at the time the sparse-checkout command is run and might not be problematic until the user later switches branches or rebases or merges, thus putting a delay between the user's error and when they have a chance to catch/notice it.
  • Related to the previous item, sparse-checkout has an add subcommand but no remove subcommand. Even if a remove subcommand were added, undoing an accidental unquoted glob runs the risk of "removing too much", as it may remove entries that had been included before the accidental add.
  • Non-cone mode uses gitignore-style patterns to select what to include (with the exception of negated patterns), while .gitignore files use gitignore-style patterns to select what to exclude (with the exception of negated patterns). The documentation on gitignore-style patterns usually does not talk in terms of matching or non-matching, but on what the user wants to "exclude". This can cause confusion for users trying to learn how to specify sparse-checkout patterns to get their desired behavior.
  • Every other git subcommand that wants to provide "special path pattern matching" of some sort uses pathspecs, but non-cone mode for sparse-checkout uses gitignore patterns, which feels inconsistent.
  • It has edge cases where the "right" behavior is unclear. Two examples:

    First, two users are in a subdirectory, and the first runs
       git sparse-checkout set '/toplevel-dir/*.c'
    while the second runs
       git sparse-checkout set relative-dir
    Should those arguments be transliterated into
       current/subdirectory/toplevel-dir/*.c
    and
       current/subdirectory/relative-dir
    before inserting into the sparse-checkout file?  The user who typed
    the first command is probably aware that arguments to set/add are
    supposed to be patterns in non-cone mode, and probably would not be
    happy with such a transliteration.  However, many gitignore-style
    patterns are just paths, which might be what the user who typed the
    second command was thinking, and they'd be upset if their argument
    wasn't transliterated.
    Second, what should bash-completion complete on for set/add commands
    for non-cone users?  If it suggests paths, is it exacerbating the
    problem above?  Also, if it suggests paths, what if the user has a
    file or directory that begins with either a '!' or '#' or has a '*',
    '\', '?', '[', or ']' in its name?  And if it suggests paths, will
    it complete "/pro" to "/proc" (in the root filesystem) rather than to
    "/progress.txt" in the current directory?  (Note that users are
    likely to want to start paths with a leading '/' in non-cone mode,
    for the same reason that .gitignore files often have one.)
    Completing on files or directories might give nasty surprises in
    all these cases.
  • The excessive flexibility made other extensions essentially impractical. --sparse-index is likely impossible in non-cone mode; even if it is somehow feasible, it would have been far more work to implement and may have been too slow in practice. Some ideas for adding coupling between partial clones and sparse checkouts are only practical with a more restricted set of paths as well.

For all these reasons, non-cone mode is deprecated. Please switch to using cone mode.

INTERNALS -- CONE MODE HANDLING

The "cone mode", which is the default, lets you specify only what directories to include. For any directory specified, all paths below that directory will be included, and any paths immediately under leading directories (including the toplevel directory) will also be included. Thus, if you specified the directory Documentation/technical/ then your sparse checkout would contain:

  • all files in the toplevel-directory
  • all files immediately under Documentation/
  • all files at any depth under Documentation/technical/

Also, in cone mode, even if no directories are specified, then the files in the toplevel directory will be included.

When changing the sparse-checkout patterns in cone mode, Git will inspect each tracked directory that is not within the sparse-checkout cone to see if it contains any untracked files. If all of those files are ignored due to the .gitignore patterns, then the directory will be deleted. If any of the untracked files within that directory is not ignored, then no deletions will occur within that directory and a warning message will appear. If these files are important, then reset your sparse-checkout definition so they are included, use git add and git commit to store them, then remove any remaining files manually to ensure Git can behave optimally.

See also the "Internals -- Cone Pattern Set" section to learn how the directories are transformed under the hood into a subset of the Full Pattern Set of sparse-checkout.

INTERNALS -- FULL PATTERN SET

The full pattern set allows for arbitrary pattern matches and complicated inclusion/exclusion rules. These can result in O(N*M) pattern matches when updating the index, where N is the number of patterns and M is the number of paths in the index. To combat this performance issue, a more restricted pattern set is allowed when core.sparseCheckoutCone is enabled.

The sparse-checkout file uses the same syntax as .gitignore files; see the section called “gitignore(5)” for details. Here, though, the patterns are usually being used to select which files to include rather than which files to exclude. (However, it can get a bit confusing since gitignore-style patterns have negations defined by patterns which begin with a !, so you can also select files to not include.)

For example, to select everything, and then to remove the file unwanted (so that every file will appear in your working tree except the file named unwanted):

git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!unwanted'

These patterns are just placed into the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout as-is, so the contents of that file at this point would be

/*
!unwanted

See also the "Sparse Checkout" section of the section called “git-read-tree(1)” to learn more about the gitignore-style patterns used in sparse checkouts.

INTERNALS -- CONE PATTERN SET

In cone mode, only directories are accepted, but they are translated into the same gitignore-style patterns used in the full pattern set. We refer to the particular patterns used in those mode as being of one of two types:

  1. Recursive: All paths inside a directory are included.
  2. Parent: All files immediately inside a directory are included.

Since cone mode always includes files at the toplevel, when running git sparse-checkout set with no directories specified, the toplevel directory is added as a parent pattern. At this point, the sparse-checkout file contains the following patterns:

/*
!/*/

This says "include everything immediately under the toplevel directory, but nothing at any level below that."

When in cone mode, the git sparse-checkout set subcommand takes a list of directories. The command git sparse-checkout set A/B/C sets the directory A/B/C as a recursive pattern, the directories A and A/B are added as parent patterns. The resulting sparse-checkout file is now

/*
!/*/
/A/
!/A/*/
/A/B/
!/A/B/*/
/A/B/C/

Here, order matters, so the negative patterns are overridden by the positive patterns that appear lower in the file.

Unless core.sparseCheckoutCone is explicitly set to false, Git will parse the sparse-checkout file expecting patterns of these types. Git will warn if the patterns do not match. If the patterns do match the expected format, then Git will use faster hash-based algorithms to compute inclusion in the sparse-checkout. If they do not match, git will behave as though core.sparseCheckoutCone was false, regardless of its setting.

In the cone mode case, despite the fact that full patterns are written to the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file, the git sparse-checkout list subcommand will list the directories that define the recursive patterns. For the example sparse-checkout file above, the output is as follows:

$ git sparse-checkout list
A/B/C

If core.ignoreCase=true, then the pattern-matching algorithm will use a case-insensitive check. This corrects for case mismatched filenames in the git sparse-checkout set command to reflect the expected cone in the working directory.

INTERNALS -- SUBMODULES

If your repository contains one or more submodules, then submodules are populated based on interactions with the git submodule command. Specifically, git submodule init -- <path> will ensure the submodule at <path> is present, while git submodule deinit [-f] -- <path> will remove the files for the submodule at <path> (including any untracked files, uncommitted changes, and unpushed history). Similar to how sparse-checkout removes files from the working tree but still leaves entries in the index, deinitialized submodules are removed from the working directory but still have an entry in the index.

Since submodules may have unpushed changes or untracked files, removing them could result in data loss. Thus, changing sparse inclusion/exclusion rules will not cause an already checked out submodule to be removed from the working copy. Said another way, just as checkout will not cause submodules to be automatically removed or initialized even when switching between branches that remove or add submodules, using sparse-checkout to reduce or expand the scope of "interesting" files will not cause submodules to be automatically deinitialized or initialized either.

Further, the above facts mean that there are multiple reasons that "tracked" files might not be present in the working copy: sparsity pattern application from sparse-checkout, and submodule initialization state. Thus, commands like git grep that work on tracked files in the working copy may return results that are limited by either or both of these restrictions.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-stage(1)

NAME

git-stage - Add file contents to the staging area

SYNOPSIS

git stage <arg>…

DESCRIPTION

This is a synonym for the section called “git-add(1)”. Please refer to the documentation of that command.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-stash(1)

NAME

git-stash - Stash the changes in a dirty working directory away

SYNOPSIS

git stash list [<log-options>]
git stash show [-u | --include-untracked | --only-untracked] [<diff-options>] [<stash>]
git stash drop [-q | --quiet] [<stash>]
git stash pop [--index] [-q | --quiet] [<stash>]
git stash apply [--index] [-q | --quiet] [<stash>]
git stash branch <branchname> [<stash>]
git stash [push [-p | --patch] [-S | --staged] [-k | --[no-]keep-index] [-q | --quiet]
             [-u | --include-untracked] [-a | --all] [(-m | --message) <message>]
             [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
             [--] [<pathspec>…]]
git stash save [-p | --patch] [-S | --staged] [-k | --[no-]keep-index] [-q | --quiet]
             [-u | --include-untracked] [-a | --all] [<message>]
git stash clear
git stash create [<message>]
git stash store [(-m | --message) <message>] [-q | --quiet] <commit>

DESCRIPTION

Use git stash when you want to record the current state of the working directory and the index, but want to go back to a clean working directory. The command saves your local modifications away and reverts the working directory to match the HEAD commit.

The modifications stashed away by this command can be listed with git stash list, inspected with git stash show, and restored (potentially on top of a different commit) with git stash apply. Calling git stash without any arguments is equivalent to git stash push. A stash is by default listed as "WIP on branchname …", but you can give a more descriptive message on the command line when you create one.

The latest stash you created is stored in refs/stash; older stashes are found in the reflog of this reference and can be named using the usual reflog syntax (e.g. stash@{0} is the most recently created stash, stash@{1} is the one before it, stash@{2.hours.ago} is also possible). Stashes may also be referenced by specifying just the stash index (e.g. the integer n is equivalent to stash@{n}).

COMMANDS

push [-p|--patch] [-S|--staged] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [-q|--quiet] [(-m|--message) <message>] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]] [--] [<pathspec>…]

Save your local modifications to a new stash entry and roll them back to HEAD (in the working tree and in the index). The <message> part is optional and gives the description along with the stashed state.

For quickly making a snapshot, you can omit "push". In this mode, non-option arguments are not allowed to prevent a misspelled subcommand from making an unwanted stash entry. The two exceptions to this are stash -p which acts as alias for stash push -p and pathspec elements, which are allowed after a double hyphen -- for disambiguation.

save [-p|--patch] [-S|--staged] [-k|--[no-]keep-index] [-u|--include-untracked] [-a|--all] [-q|--quiet] [<message>]
This option is deprecated in favour of git stash push. It differs from "stash push" in that it cannot take pathspec. Instead, all non-option arguments are concatenated to form the stash message.
list [<log-options>]

List the stash entries that you currently have. Each stash entry is listed with its name (e.g. stash@{0} is the latest entry, stash@{1} is the one before, etc.), the name of the branch that was current when the entry was made, and a short description of the commit the entry was based on.

stash@{0}: WIP on submit: 6ebd0e2... Update git-stash documentation
stash@{1}: On master: 9cc0589... Add git-stash

The command takes options applicable to the git log command to control what is shown and how. See the section called “git-log(1)”.

show [-u|--include-untracked|--only-untracked] [<diff-options>] [<stash>]
Show the changes recorded in the stash entry as a diff between the stashed contents and the commit back when the stash entry was first created. By default, the command shows the diffstat, but it will accept any format known to git diff (e.g., git stash show -p stash@{1} to view the second most recent entry in patch form). If no <diff-option> is provided, the default behavior will be given by the stash.showStat, and stash.showPatch config variables. You can also use stash.showIncludeUntracked to set whether --include-untracked is enabled by default.
pop [--index] [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]

Remove a single stashed state from the stash list and apply it on top of the current working tree state, i.e., do the inverse operation of git stash push. The working directory must match the index.

Applying the state can fail with conflicts; in this case, it is not removed from the stash list. You need to resolve the conflicts by hand and call git stash drop manually afterwards.

apply [--index] [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]
Like pop, but do not remove the state from the stash list. Unlike pop, <stash> may be any commit that looks like a commit created by stash push or stash create.
branch <branchname> [<stash>]

Creates and checks out a new branch named <branchname> starting from the commit at which the <stash> was originally created, applies the changes recorded in <stash> to the new working tree and index. If that succeeds, and <stash> is a reference of the form stash@{<revision>}, it then drops the <stash>.

This is useful if the branch on which you ran git stash push has changed enough that git stash apply fails due to conflicts. Since the stash entry is applied on top of the commit that was HEAD at the time git stash was run, it restores the originally stashed state with no conflicts.

clear
Remove all the stash entries. Note that those entries will then be subject to pruning, and may be impossible to recover (see Examples below for a possible strategy).
drop [-q|--quiet] [<stash>]
Remove a single stash entry from the list of stash entries.
create
Create a stash entry (which is a regular commit object) and return its object name, without storing it anywhere in the ref namespace. This is intended to be useful for scripts. It is probably not the command you want to use; see "push" above.
store
Store a given stash created via git stash create (which is a dangling merge commit) in the stash ref, updating the stash reflog. This is intended to be useful for scripts. It is probably not the command you want to use; see "push" above.

OPTIONS

-a , --all

This option is only valid for push and save commands.

All ignored and untracked files are also stashed and then cleaned up with git clean.

-u , --include-untracked , --no-include-untracked

When used with the push and save commands, all untracked files are also stashed and then cleaned up with git clean.

When used with the show command, show the untracked files in the stash entry as part of the diff.

--only-untracked

This option is only valid for the show command.

Show only the untracked files in the stash entry as part of the diff.

--index

This option is only valid for pop and apply commands.

Tries to reinstate not only the working tree's changes, but also the index's ones. However, this can fail, when you have conflicts (which are stored in the index, where you therefore can no longer apply the changes as they were originally).

-k , --keep-index , --no-keep-index

This option is only valid for push and save commands.

All changes already added to the index are left intact.

-p , --patch

This option is only valid for push and save commands.

Interactively select hunks from the diff between HEAD and the working tree to be stashed. The stash entry is constructed such that its index state is the same as the index state of your repository, and its worktree contains only the changes you selected interactively. The selected changes are then rolled back from your worktree. See the Interactive Mode section of the section called “git-add(1)” to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

The --patch option implies --keep-index. You can use --no-keep-index to override this.

-S , --staged

This option is only valid for push and save commands.

Stash only the changes that are currently staged. This is similar to basic git commit except the state is committed to the stash instead of current branch.

The --patch option has priority over this one.

--pathspec-from-file=<file>

This option is only valid for push command.

Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.

--pathspec-file-nul

This option is only valid for push command.

Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).

-q , --quiet

This option is only valid for apply, drop, pop, push, save, store commands.

Quiet, suppress feedback messages.

--

This option is only valid for push command.

Separates pathspec from options for disambiguation purposes.

<pathspec>…

This option is only valid for push command.

The new stash entry records the modified states only for the files that match the pathspec. The index entries and working tree files are then rolled back to the state in HEAD only for these files, too, leaving files that do not match the pathspec intact.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

<stash>

This option is only valid for apply, branch, drop, pop, show commands.

A reference of the form stash@{<revision>}. When no <stash> is given, the latest stash is assumed (that is, stash@{0}).

DISCUSSION

A stash entry is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory, and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the entry was created. The tree of the second parent records the state of the index when the entry is made, and it is made a child of the HEAD commit. The ancestry graph looks like this:

       .----W
      /    /
-----H----I

where H is the HEAD commit, I is a commit that records the state of the index, and W is a commit that records the state of the working tree.

EXAMPLES

Pulling into a dirty tree

When you are in the middle of something, you learn that there are upstream changes that are possibly relevant to what you are doing. When your local changes do not conflict with the changes in the upstream, a simple git pull will let you move forward.

However, there are cases in which your local changes do conflict with the upstream changes, and git pull refuses to overwrite your changes. In such a case, you can stash your changes away, perform a pull, and then unstash, like this:

$ git pull
 ...
file foobar not up to date, cannot merge.
$ git stash
$ git pull
$ git stash pop
Interrupted workflow

When you are in the middle of something, your boss comes in and demands that you fix something immediately. Traditionally, you would make a commit to a temporary branch to store your changes away, and return to your original branch to make the emergency fix, like this:

# ... hack hack hack ...
$ git switch -c my_wip
$ git commit -a -m "WIP"
$ git switch master
$ edit emergency fix
$ git commit -a -m "Fix in a hurry"
$ git switch my_wip
$ git reset --soft HEAD^
# ... continue hacking ...

You can use git stash to simplify the above, like this:

# ... hack hack hack ...
$ git stash
$ edit emergency fix
$ git commit -a -m "Fix in a hurry"
$ git stash pop
# ... continue hacking ...
Testing partial commits

You can use git stash push --keep-index when you want to make two or more commits out of the changes in the work tree, and you want to test each change before committing:

# ... hack hack hack ...
$ git add --patch foo            # add just first part to the index
$ git stash push --keep-index    # save all other changes to the stash
$ edit/build/test first part
$ git commit -m 'First part'     # commit fully tested change
$ git stash pop                  # prepare to work on all other changes
# ... repeat above five steps until one commit remains ...
$ edit/build/test remaining parts
$ git commit foo -m 'Remaining parts'
Saving unrelated changes for future use

When you are in the middle of massive changes and you find some unrelated issue that you don't want to forget to fix, you can do the change(s), stage them, and use git stash push --staged to stash them out for future use. This is similar to committing the staged changes, only the commit ends-up being in the stash and not on the current branch.

# ... hack hack hack ...
$ git add --patch foo           # add unrelated changes to the index
$ git stash push --staged       # save these changes to the stash
# ... hack hack hack, finish current changes ...
$ git commit -m 'Massive'       # commit fully tested changes
$ git switch fixup-branch       # switch to another branch
$ git stash pop                 # to finish work on the saved changes
Recovering stash entries that were cleared/dropped erroneously

If you mistakenly drop or clear stash entries, they cannot be recovered through the normal safety mechanisms. However, you can try the following incantation to get a list of stash entries that are still in your repository, but not reachable any more:

git fsck --unreachable |
grep commit | cut -d\  -f3 |
xargs git log --merges --no-walk --grep=WIP

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

stash.showIncludeUntracked
If this is set to true, the git stash show command will show the untracked files of a stash entry. Defaults to false. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.
stash.showPatch
If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show the stash entry in patch form. Defaults to false. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.
stash.showStat
If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show a diffstat of the stash entry. Defaults to true. See the description of the show command in the section called “git-stash(1)”.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-status(1)

NAME

git-status - Show the working tree status

SYNOPSIS

git status [<options>] [--] [<pathspec>…]

DESCRIPTION

Displays paths that have differences between the index file and the current HEAD commit, paths that have differences between the working tree and the index file, and paths in the working tree that are not tracked by Git (and are not ignored by the section called “gitignore(5)”). The first are what you would commit by running git commit; the second and third are what you could commit by running git add before running git commit.

OPTIONS

-s , --short
Give the output in the short-format.
-b , --branch
Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format.
--show-stash
Show the number of entries currently stashed away.
--porcelain[=<version>]

Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain stable across Git versions and regardless of user configuration. See below for details.

The version parameter is used to specify the format version. This is optional and defaults to the original version v1 format.

--long
Give the output in the long-format. This is the default.
-v , --verbose
In addition to the names of files that have been changed, also show the textual changes that are staged to be committed (i.e., like the output of git diff --cached). If -v is specified twice, then also show the changes in the working tree that have not yet been staged (i.e., like the output of git diff).
-u[<mode>] , --untracked-files[=<mode>]

Show untracked files.

The mode parameter is used to specify the handling of untracked files. It is optional: it defaults to all, and if specified, it must be stuck to the option (e.g. -uno, but not -u no).

The possible options are:

  • no - Show no untracked files.
  • normal - Shows untracked files and directories.
  • all - Also shows individual files in untracked directories.

When -u option is not used, untracked files and directories are shown (i.e. the same as specifying normal), to help you avoid forgetting to add newly created files. Because it takes extra work to find untracked files in the filesystem, this mode may take some time in a large working tree. Consider enabling untracked cache and split index if supported (see git update-index --untracked-cache and git update-index --split-index), Otherwise you can use no to have git status return more quickly without showing untracked files. All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal and false as no.

The default can be changed using the status.showUntrackedFiles configuration variable documented in the section called “git-config(1)”.

--ignore-submodules[=<when>]
Ignore changes to submodules when looking for changes. <when> can be either "none", "untracked", "dirty" or "all", which is the default. Using "none" will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in the section called “git-config(1)” or the section called “gitmodules(5)”. When "untracked" is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using "dirty" ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior before 1.7.0). Using "all" hides all changes to submodules (and suppresses the output of submodule summaries when the config option status.submoduleSummary is set).
--ignored[=<mode>]

Show ignored files as well.

The mode parameter is used to specify the handling of ignored files. It is optional: it defaults to traditional.

The possible options are:

  • traditional - Shows ignored files and directories, unless --untracked-files=all is specified, in which case individual files in ignored directories are displayed.
  • no - Show no ignored files.
  • matching - Shows ignored files and directories matching an ignore pattern.

When matching mode is specified, paths that explicitly match an ignored pattern are shown. If a directory matches an ignore pattern, then it is shown, but not paths contained in the ignored directory. If a directory does not match an ignore pattern, but all contents are ignored, then the directory is not shown, but all contents are shown.

-z
Terminate entries with NUL, instead of LF. This implies the --porcelain=v1 output format if no other format is given.
--column[=<options>] , --no-column
Display untracked files in columns. See configuration variable column.status for option syntax. --column and --no-column without options are equivalent to always and never respectively.
--ahead-behind , --no-ahead-behind
Display or do not display detailed ahead/behind counts for the branch relative to its upstream branch. Defaults to true.
--renames , --no-renames
Turn on/off rename detection regardless of user configuration. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --no-renames.
--find-renames[=<n>]
Turn on rename detection, optionally setting the similarity threshold. See also the section called “git-diff(1)” --find-renames.
<pathspec>…
See the pathspec entry in the section called “gitglossary(7)”.

OUTPUT

The output from this command is designed to be used as a commit template comment. The default, long format, is designed to be human readable, verbose and descriptive. Its contents and format are subject to change at any time.

The paths mentioned in the output, unlike many other Git commands, are made relative to the current directory if you are working in a subdirectory (this is on purpose, to help cutting and pasting). See the status.relativePaths config option below.

Short Format

In the short-format, the status of each path is shown as one of these forms

XY PATH
XY ORIG_PATH -> PATH

where ORIG_PATH is where the renamed/copied contents came from. ORIG_PATH is only shown when the entry is renamed or copied. The XY is a two-letter status code.

The fields (including the ->) are separated from each other by a single space. If a filename contains whitespace or other nonprintable characters, that field will be quoted in the manner of a C string literal: surrounded by ASCII double quote (34) characters, and with interior special characters backslash-escaped.

There are three different types of states that are shown using this format, and each one uses the XY syntax differently:

  • When a merge is occurring and the merge was successful, or outside of a merge situation, X shows the status of the index and Y shows the status of the working tree.
  • When a merge conflict has occurred and has not yet been resolved, X and Y show the state introduced by each head of the merge, relative to the common ancestor. These paths are said to be unmerged.
  • When a path is untracked, X and Y are always the same, since they are unknown to the index. ?? is used for untracked paths. Ignored files are not listed unless --ignored is used; if it is, ignored files are indicated by !!.

Note that the term merge here also includes rebases using the default --merge strategy, cherry-picks, and anything else using the merge machinery.

In the following table, these three classes are shown in separate sections, and these characters are used for X and Y fields for the first two sections that show tracked paths:

  • ' ' = unmodified
  • M = modified
  • T = file type changed (regular file, symbolic link or submodule)
  • A = added
  • D = deleted
  • R = renamed
  • C = copied (if config option status.renames is set to "copies")
  • U = updated but unmerged
X          Y     Meaning
-------------------------------------------------
         [AMD]   not updated
M        [ MTD]  updated in index
T        [ MTD]  type changed in index
A        [ MTD]  added to index
D                deleted from index
R        [ MTD]  renamed in index
C        [ MTD]  copied in index
[MTARC]          index and work tree matches
[ MTARC]    M    work tree changed since index
[ MTARC]    T    type changed in work tree since index
[ MTARC]    D    deleted in work tree
            R    renamed in work tree
            C    copied in work tree
-------------------------------------------------
D           D    unmerged, both deleted
A           U    unmerged, added by us
U           D    unmerged, deleted by them
U           A    unmerged, added by them
D           U    unmerged, deleted by us
A           A    unmerged, both added
U           U    unmerged, both modified
-------------------------------------------------
?           ?    untracked
!           !    ignored
-------------------------------------------------

Submodules have more state and instead report

  • M = the submodule has a different HEAD than recorded in the index
  • m = the submodule has modified content
  • ? = the submodule has untracked files

This is since modified content or untracked files in a submodule cannot be added via git add in the superproject to prepare a commit.

m and ? are applied recursively. For example if a nested submodule in a submodule contains an untracked file, this is reported as ? as well.

If -b is used the short-format status is preceded by a line

## branchname tracking info

Porcelain Format Version 1

Version 1 porcelain format is similar to the short format, but is guaranteed not to change in a backwards-incompatible way between Git versions or based on user configuration. This makes it ideal for parsing by scripts. The description of the short format above also describes the porcelain format, with a few exceptions:

  1. The user's color.status configuration is not respected; color will always be off.
  2. The user's status.relativePaths configuration is not respected; paths shown will always be relative to the repository root.

There is also an alternate -z format recommended for machine parsing. In that format, the status field is the same, but some other things change. First, the -> is omitted from rename entries and the field order is reversed (e.g from -> to becomes to from). Second, a NUL (ASCII 0) follows each filename, replacing space as a field separator and the terminating newline (but a space still separates the status field from the first filename). Third, filenames containing special characters are not specially formatted; no quoting or backslash-escaping is performed.

Any submodule changes are reported as modified M instead of m or single ?.

Porcelain Format Version 2

Version 2 format adds more detailed information about the state of the worktree and changed items. Version 2 also defines an extensible set of easy to parse optional headers.

Header lines start with "#" and are added in response to specific command line arguments. Parsers should ignore headers they don't recognize.

Branch Headers

If --branch is given, a series of header lines are printed with information about the current branch.

Line                                     Notes
------------------------------------------------------------
# branch.oid <commit> | (initial)        Current commit.
# branch.head <branch> | (detached)      Current branch.
# branch.upstream <upstream-branch>      If upstream is set.
# branch.ab +<ahead> -<behind>           If upstream is set and
                                         the commit is present.
------------------------------------------------------------

Stash Information

If --show-stash is given, one line is printed showing the number of stash entries if non-zero:

# stash <N>

Changed Tracked Entries

Following the headers, a series of lines are printed for tracked entries. One of three different line formats may be used to describe an entry depending on the type of change. Tracked entries are printed in an undefined order; parsers should allow for a mixture of the 3 line types in any order.

Ordinary changed entries have the following format:

1 <XY> <sub> <mH> <mI> <mW> <hH> <hI> <path>

Renamed or copied entries have the following format:

2 <XY> <sub> <mH> <mI> <mW> <hH> <hI> <X><score> <path><sep><origPath>
Field       Meaning
--------------------------------------------------------
<XY>        A 2 character field containing the staged and
            unstaged XY values described in the short format,
            with unchanged indicated by a "." rather than
            a space.
<sub>       A 4 character field describing the submodule state.
            "N..." when the entry is not a submodule.
            "S<c><m><u>" when the entry is a submodule.
            <c> is "C" if the commit changed; otherwise ".".
            <m> is "M" if it has tracked changes; otherwise ".".
            <u> is "U" if there are untracked changes; otherwise ".".
<mH>        The octal file mode in HEAD.
<mI>        The octal file mode in the index.
<mW>        The octal file mode in the worktree.
<hH>        The object name in HEAD.
<hI>        The object name in the index.
<X><score>  The rename or copy score (denoting the percentage
            of similarity between the source and target of the
            move or copy). For example "R100" or "C75".
<path>      The pathname.  In a renamed/copied entry, this
            is the target path.
<sep>       When the `-z` option is used, the 2 pathnames are separated
            with a NUL (ASCII 0x00) byte; otherwise, a tab (ASCII 0x09)
            byte separates them.
<origPath>  The pathname in the commit at HEAD or in the index.
            This is only present in a renamed/copied entry, and
            tells where the renamed/copied contents came from.
--------------------------------------------------------

Unmerged entries have the following format; the first character is a "u" to distinguish from ordinary changed entries.

u <XY> <sub> <m1> <m2> <m3> <mW> <h1> <h2> <h3> <path>
Field       Meaning
--------------------------------------------------------
<XY>        A 2 character field describing the conflict type
            as described in the short format.
<sub>       A 4 character field describing the submodule state
            as described above.
<m1>        The octal file mode in stage 1.
<m2>        The octal file mode in stage 2.
<m3>        The octal file mode in stage 3.
<mW>        The octal file mode in the worktree.
<h1>        The object name in stage 1.
<h2>        The object name in stage 2.
<h3>        The object name in stage 3.
<path>      The pathname.
--------------------------------------------------------

Other Items

Following the tracked entries (and if requested), a series of lines will be printed for untracked and then ignored items found in the worktree.

Untracked items have the following format:

? <path>

Ignored items have the following format:

! <path>

Pathname Format Notes and -z

When the -z option is given, pathnames are printed as is and without any quoting and lines are terminated with a NUL (ASCII 0x00) byte.

Without the -z option, pathnames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

CONFIGURATION

The command honors color.status (or status.color -- they mean the same thing and the latter is kept for backward compatibility) and color.status.<slot> configuration variables to colorize its output.

If the config variable status.relativePaths is set to false, then all paths shown are relative to the repository root, not to the current directory.

If status.submoduleSummary is set to a non zero number or true (identical to -1 or an unlimited number), the submodule summary will be enabled for the long format and a summary of commits for modified submodules will be shown (see --summary-limit option of the section called “git-submodule(1)”). Please note that the summary output from the status command will be suppressed for all submodules when diff.ignoreSubmodules is set to all or only for those submodules where submodule.<name>.ignore=all. To also view the summary for ignored submodules you can either use the --ignore-submodules=dirty command line option or the git submodule summary command, which shows a similar output but does not honor these settings.

BACKGROUND REFRESH

By default, git status will automatically refresh the index, updating the cached stat information from the working tree and writing out the result. Writing out the updated index is an optimization that isn't strictly necessary (status computes the values for itself, but writing them out is just to save subsequent programs from repeating our computation). When status is run in the background, the lock held during the write may conflict with other simultaneous processes, causing them to fail. Scripts running status in the background should consider using git --no-optional-locks status (see the section called “git(1)” for details).

UNTRACKED FILES AND PERFORMANCE

git status can be very slow in large worktrees if/when it needs to search for untracked files and directories. There are many configuration options available to speed this up by either avoiding the work or making use of cached results from previous Git commands. There is no single optimum set of settings right for everyone. We'll list a summary of the relevant options to help you, but before going into the list, you may want to run git status again, because your configuration may already be caching git status results, so it could be faster on subsequent runs.

  • The --untracked-files=no flag or the status.showUntrackedFiles=no config (see above for both): indicate that git status should not report untracked files. This is the fastest option. git status will not list the untracked files, so you need to be careful to remember if you create any new files and manually git add them.
  • advice.statusUoption=false (see the section called “git-config(1)”): setting this variable to false disables the warning message given when enumerating untracked files takes more than 2 seconds. In a large project, it may take longer and the user may have already accepted the trade off (e.g. using "-uno" may not be an acceptable option for the user), in which case, there is no point issuing the warning message, and in such a case, disabling the warning may be the best.
  • core.untrackedCache=true (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”): enable the untracked cache feature and only search directories that have been modified since the previous git status command. Git remembers the set of untracked files within each directory and assumes that if a directory has not been modified, then the set of untracked files within has not changed. This is much faster than enumerating the contents of every directory, but still not without cost, because Git still has to search for the set of modified directories. The untracked cache is stored in the .git/index file. The reduced cost of searching for untracked files is offset slightly by the increased size of the index and the cost of keeping it up-to-date. That reduced search time is usually worth the additional size.
  • core.untrackedCache=true and core.fsmonitor=true or core.fsmonitor=<hook-command-pathname> (see the section called “git-update-index(1)”): enable both the untracked cache and FSMonitor features and only search directories that have been modified since the previous git status command. This is faster than using just the untracked cache alone because Git can also avoid searching for modified directories. Git only has to enumerate the exact set of directories that have changed recently. While the FSMonitor feature can be enabled without the untracked cache, the benefits are greatly reduced in that case.

Note that after you turn on the untracked cache and/or FSMonitor features it may take a few git status commands for the various caches to warm up before you see improved command times. This is normal.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-stripspace(1)

NAME

git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace

SYNOPSIS

git stripspace [-s | --strip-comments]
git stripspace [-c | --comment-lines]

DESCRIPTION

Read text, such as commit messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions, from the standard input and clean it in the manner used by Git.

With no arguments, this will:

  • remove trailing whitespace from all lines
  • collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
  • remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
  • add a missing \n to the last line if necessary.

In the case where the input consists entirely of whitespace characters, no output will be produced.

NOTE: This is intended for cleaning metadata. Prefer the --whitespace=fix mode of the section called “git-apply(1)” for correcting whitespace of patches or files in the repository.

OPTIONS

-s , --strip-comments
Skip and remove all lines starting with a comment character (core.commentChar, default #).
-c , --comment-lines
Prepend the comment character and a blank space to each line. Lines will automatically be terminated with a newline. On empty lines, only the comment character will be prepended.

EXAMPLES

Given the following noisy input with $ indicating the end of a line:

|A brief introduction   $
|   $
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line    $
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out. $
|      $
|The end.$
|  $

Use git stripspace with no arguments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out.$
|$
|The end.$

Use git stripspace --strip-comments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|The end.$

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-switch(1)

NAME

git-switch - Switch branches

SYNOPSIS

git switch [<options>] [--no-guess<branch>
git switch [<options>--detach [<start-point>]
git switch [<options>] (-c|-C<new-branch> [<start-point>]
git switch [<options>--orphan <new-branch>

DESCRIPTION

Switch to a specified branch. The working tree and the index are updated to match the branch. All new commits will be added to the tip of this branch.

Optionally a new branch could be created with either -c, -C, automatically from a remote branch of same name (see --guess), or detach the working tree from any branch with --detach, along with switching.

Switching branches does not require a clean index and working tree (i.e. no differences compared to HEAD). The operation is aborted however if the operation leads to loss of local changes, unless told otherwise with --discard-changes or --merge.

THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.

OPTIONS

<branch>
Branch to switch to.
<new-branch>
Name for the new branch.
<start-point>

The starting point for the new branch. Specifying a <start-point> allows you to create a branch based on some other point in history than where HEAD currently points. (Or, in the case of --detach, allows you to inspect and detach from some other point.)

You can use the @{-<N>} syntax to refer to the <N>-th last branch/commit switched to using git switch or git checkout operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to @{-1}. This is often used to switch quickly between two branches, or to undo a branch switch by mistake.

As a special case, you may use <rev-a>...<rev-b> as a shortcut for the merge base of <rev-a> and <rev-b> if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-a> and <rev-b>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

-c <new-branch> , --create <new-branch>

Create a new branch named <new-branch> starting at <start-point> before switching to the branch. This is the transactional equivalent of

$ git branch <new-branch>
$ git switch <new-branch>

that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless git switch is successful (e.g., when the branch is in use in another worktree, not just the current branch stays the same, but the branch is not reset to the start-point, either).

-C <new-branch> , --force-create <new-branch>

Similar to --create except that if <new-branch> already exists, it will be reset to <start-point>. This is a convenient shortcut for:

$ git branch -f _<new-branch>_
$ git switch _<new-branch>_
-d , --detach
Switch to a commit for inspection and discardable experiments. See the "DETACHED HEAD" section in the section called “git-checkout(1)” for details.
--guess , --no-guess

If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to

$ git switch -c <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is named by the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable, we'll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if the <branch> isn't unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g. checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout remote branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the origin remote. See also checkout.defaultRemote in the section called “git-config(1)”.

--guess is the default behavior. Use --no-guess to disable it.

The default behavior can be set via the checkout.guess configuration variable.

-f , --force
An alias for --discard-changes.
--discard-changes
Proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. Both the index and working tree are restored to match the switching target. If --recurse-submodules is specified, submodule content is also restored to match the switching target. This is used to throw away local changes.
-m , --merge

If you have local modifications to one or more files that are different between the current branch and the branch to which you are switching, the command refuses to switch branches in order to preserve your modifications in context. However, with this option, a three-way merge between the current branch, your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and you will be on the new branch.

When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you need to resolve the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should result in deletion of the path).

--conflict=<style>
The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the merge.conflictStyle configuration variable. Possible values are merge (default), diff3, and zdiff3.
-q , --quiet
Quiet, suppress feedback messages.
--progress , --no-progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --quiet is specified. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a terminal, regardless of --quiet.
-t , --track[ (direct|inherit)]

When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. -c is implied. See --track in the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.

If no -c option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and then stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given name has no slash, or the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted. You can explicitly give a name with -c in such a case.

--no-track
Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable is true.
--orphan <new-branch>
Create a new unborn branch, named <new-branch>. All tracked files are removed.
--ignore-other-worktrees
git switch refuses when the wanted ref is already checked out by another worktree. This option makes it check the ref out anyway. In other words, the ref can be held by more than one worktree.
--recurse-submodules , --no-recurse-submodules
Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all active submodules according to the commit recorded in the superproject. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used, submodules working trees will not be updated. Just like the section called “git-submodule(1)”, this will detach HEAD of the submodules.

EXAMPLES

The following command switches to the "master" branch:

$ git switch master

After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch would be done using:

$ git switch mytopic

However, your "wrong" branch and correct "mytopic" branch may differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case the above switch would fail like this:

$ git switch mytopic
error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.

You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a three-way merge:

$ git switch -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz

After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not registered in your index file, so git diff would show you what changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

To switch back to the previous branch before we switched to mytopic (i.e. "master" branch):

$ git switch -

You can grow a new branch from any commit. For example, switch to "HEAD~3" and create branch "fixup":

$ git switch -c fixup HEAD~3
Switched to a new branch 'fixup'

If you want to start a new branch from a remote branch of the same name:

$ git switch new-topic
Branch `new-topic` set up to track remote branch `new-topic` from `origin`
Switched to a new branch `new-topic`

To check out commit HEAD~3 for temporary inspection or experiment without creating a new branch:

$ git switch --detach HEAD~3
HEAD is now at 9fc9555312 Merge branch 'cc/shared-index-permbits'

If it turns out whatever you have done is worth keeping, you can always create a new name for it (without switching away):

$ git switch -c good-surprises

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the the section called “git-config(1)” documentation. The content is the same as what's found there:

checkout.defaultRemote

When you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something> and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/<something>. This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it comes to disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this to origin.

Currently this is used by the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)” when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by the section called “git-worktree(1)” when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like commands or functionality in the future.

checkout.guess
Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. See the section called “git-switch(1)” and the section called “git-checkout(1)”.
checkout.workers

The number of parallel workers to use when updating the working tree. The default is one, i.e. sequential execution. If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as the number of logical cores available. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

Note

Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also influence how well the parallel version performs.

checkout.thresholdForParallelism
When running parallel checkout with a small number of files, the cost of subprocess spawning and inter-process communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This setting allows you to define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is 100.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-submodule(1)

NAME

git-submodule - Initialize, update or inspect submodules

SYNOPSIS

git submodule [--quiet] [--cached]
git submodule [--quiet] add [<options>] [--] <repository> [<path>]
git submodule [--quiet] status [--cached] [--recursive] [--] [<path>…]
git submodule [--quiet] init [--] [<path>…]
git submodule [--quiet] deinit [-f|--force] (--all|[--] <path>…)
git submodule [--quiet] update [<options>] [--] [<path>…]
git submodule [--quiet] set-branch [<options>] [--] <path>
git submodule [--quiet] set-url [--] <path> <newurl>
git submodule [--quiet] summary [<options>] [--] [<path>…]
git submodule [--quiet] foreach [--recursive] <command>
git submodule [--quiet] sync [--recursive] [--] [<path>…]
git submodule [--quiet] absorbgitdirs [--] [<path>…]

DESCRIPTION

Inspects, updates and manages submodules.

For more information about submodules, see the section called “gitsubmodules(7)”.

COMMANDS

With no arguments, shows the status of existing submodules. Several subcommands are available to perform operations on the submodules.

add [-b <branch>] [-f|--force] [--name <name>] [--reference <repository>] [--ref-format <format>] [--depth <depth>] [--] <repository> [<path>]

Add the given repository as a submodule at the given path to the changeset to be committed next to the current project: the current project is termed the "superproject".

<repository> is the URL of the new submodule's origin repository. This may be either an absolute URL, or (if it begins with ./ or ../), the location relative to the superproject's default remote repository (Please note that to specify a repository foo.git which is located right next to a superproject bar.git, you'll have to use ../foo.git instead of ./foo.git - as one might expect when following the rules for relative URLs - because the evaluation of relative URLs in Git is identical to that of relative directories).

The default remote is the remote of the remote-tracking branch of the current branch. If no such remote-tracking branch exists or the HEAD is detached, "origin" is assumed to be the default remote. If the superproject doesn't have a default remote configured the superproject is its own authoritative upstream and the current working directory is used instead.

The optional argument <path> is the relative location for the cloned submodule to exist in the superproject. If <path> is not given, the canonical part of the source repository is used ("repo" for "/path/to/repo.git" and "foo" for "host.xz:foo/.git"). If <path> exists and is already a valid Git repository, then it is staged for commit without cloning. The <path> is also used as the submodule's logical name in its configuration entries unless --name is used to specify a logical name.

The given URL is recorded into .gitmodules for use by subsequent users cloning the superproject. If the URL is given relative to the superproject's repository, the presumption is the superproject and submodule repositories will be kept together in the same relative location, and only the superproject's URL needs to be provided. git-submodule will correctly locate the submodule using the relative URL in .gitmodules.

If --ref-format <format> is specified, the ref storage format of newly cloned submodules will be set accordingly.

status [--cached] [--recursive] [--] [<path>…]

Show the status of the submodules. This will print the SHA-1 of the currently checked out commit for each submodule, along with the submodule path and the output of git describe for the SHA-1. Each SHA-1 will possibly be prefixed with - if the submodule is not initialized, + if the currently checked out submodule commit does not match the SHA-1 found in the index of the containing repository and U if the submodule has merge conflicts.

If --cached is specified, this command will instead print the SHA-1 recorded in the superproject for each submodule.

If --recursive is specified, this command will recurse into nested submodules, and show their status as well.

If you are only interested in changes of the currently initialized submodules with respect to the commit recorded in the index or the HEAD, the section called “git-status(1)” and the section called “git-diff(1)” will provide that information too (and can also report changes to a submodule's work tree).

init [--] [<path>…]

Initialize the submodules recorded in the index (which were added and committed elsewhere) by setting submodule.$name.url in .git/config, using the same setting from .gitmodules as a template. If the URL is relative, it will be resolved using the default remote. If there is no default remote, the current repository will be assumed to be upstream.

Optional <path> arguments limit which submodules will be initialized. If no path is specified and submodule.active has been configured, submodules configured to be active will be initialized, otherwise all submodules are initialized.

It will also copy the value of submodule.$name.update, if present in the .gitmodules file, to .git/config, but (1) this command does not alter existing information in .git/config, and (2) submodule.$name.update that is set to a custom command is not copied for security reasons.

You can then customize the submodule clone URLs in .git/config for your local setup and proceed to git submodule update; you can also just use git submodule update --init without the explicit init step if you do not intend to customize any submodule locations.

See the add subcommand for the definition of default remote.

deinit [-f|--force] (--all|[--] <path>…)

Unregister the given submodules, i.e. remove the whole submodule.$name section from .git/config together with their work tree. Further calls to git submodule update, git submodule foreach and git submodule sync will skip any unregistered submodules until they are initialized again, so use this command if you don't want to have a local checkout of the submodule in your working tree anymore.

When the command is run without pathspec, it errors out, instead of deinit-ing everything, to prevent mistakes.

If --force is specified, the submodule's working tree will be removed even if it contains local modifications.

If you really want to remove a submodule from the repository and commit that use the section called “git-rm(1)” instead. See the section called “gitsubmodules(7)” for removal options.

update [--init] [--remote] [-N|--no-fetch] [--[no-]recommend-shallow] [-f|--force] [--checkout|--rebase|--merge] [--reference <repository>] [--ref-format <format>] [--depth <depth>] [--recursive] [--jobs <n>] [--[no-]single-branch] [--filter <filter-spec>] [--] [<path>…]

Update the registered submodules to match what the superproject expects by cloning missing submodules, fetching missing commits in submodules and updating the working tree of the submodules. The "updating" can be done in several ways depending on command line options and the value of submodule.<name>.update configuration variable. The command line option takes precedence over the configuration variable. If neither is given, a checkout is performed. (note: what is in .gitmodules file is irrelevant at this point; see git submodule init above for how .gitmodules is used). The update procedures supported both from the command line as well as through the submodule.<name>.update configuration are:

checkout

the commit recorded in the superproject will be checked out in the submodule on a detached HEAD.

If --force is specified, the submodule will be checked out (using git checkout --force), even if the commit specified in the index of the containing repository already matches the commit checked out in the submodule.

rebase
the current branch of the submodule will be rebased onto the commit recorded in the superproject.
merge
the commit recorded in the superproject will be merged into the current branch in the submodule.

The following update procedures have additional limitations:

custom command
mechanism for running arbitrary commands with the commit ID as an argument. Specifically, if the submodule.<name>.update configuration variable is set to !custom command, the object name of the commit recorded in the superproject for the submodule is appended to the custom command string and executed. Note that this mechanism is not supported in the .gitmodules file or on the command line.
none
the submodule is not updated. This update procedure is not allowed on the command line.

If the submodule is not yet initialized, and you just want to use the setting as stored in .gitmodules, you can automatically initialize the submodule with the --init option.

If --recursive is specified, this command will recurse into the registered submodules, and update any nested submodules within.

If --ref-format <format> is specified, the ref storage format of newly cloned submodules will be set accordingly.

If --filter <filter-spec> is specified, the given partial clone filter will be applied to the submodule. See the section called “git-rev-list(1)” for details on filter specifications.

set-branch (-b|--branch) <branch> [--] <path> , set-branch (-d|--default) [--] <path>
Sets the default remote tracking branch for the submodule. The --branch option allows the remote branch to be specified. The --default option removes the submodule.<name>.branch configuration key, which causes the tracking branch to default to the remote HEAD.
set-url [--] <path> <newurl>
Sets the URL of the specified submodule to <newurl>. Then, it will automatically synchronize the submodule's new remote URL configuration.
summary [--cached|--files] [(-n|--summary-limit) <n>] [commit] [--] [<path>…]

Show commit summary between the given commit (defaults to HEAD) and working tree/index. For a submodule in question, a series of commits in the submodule between the given super project commit and the index or working tree (switched by --cached) are shown. If the option --files is given, show the series of commits in the submodule between the index of the super project and the working tree of the submodule (this option doesn't allow to use the --cached option or to provide an explicit commit).

Using the --submodule=log option with the section called “git-diff(1)” will provide that information too.

foreach [--recursive] <command>

Evaluates an arbitrary shell command in each checked out submodule. The command has access to the variables $name, $sm_path, $displaypath, $sha1 and $toplevel: $name is the name of the relevant submodule section in .gitmodules, $sm_path is the path of the submodule as recorded in the immediate superproject, $displaypath contains the relative path from the current working directory to the submodules root directory, $sha1 is the commit as recorded in the immediate superproject, and $toplevel is the absolute path to the top-level of the immediate superproject. Note that to avoid conflicts with $PATH on Windows, the $path variable is now a deprecated synonym of $sm_path variable. Any submodules defined in the superproject but not checked out are ignored by this command. Unless given --quiet, foreach prints the name of each submodule before evaluating the command. If --recursive is given, submodules are traversed recursively (i.e. the given shell command is evaluated in nested submodules as well). A non-zero return from the command in any submodule causes the processing to terminate. This can be overridden by adding || : to the end of the command.

As an example, the command below will show the path and currently checked out commit for each submodule:

git submodule foreach 'echo $sm_path `git rev-parse HEAD`'
sync [--recursive] [--] [<path>…]

Synchronizes submodules' remote URL configuration setting to the value specified in .gitmodules. It will only affect those submodules which already have a URL entry in .git/config (that is the case when they are initialized or freshly added). This is useful when submodule URLs change upstream and you need to update your local repositories accordingly.

git submodule sync synchronizes all submodules while git submodule sync -- A synchronizes submodule "A" only.

If --recursive is specified, this command will recurse into the registered submodules, and sync any nested submodules within.

absorbgitdirs

If a git directory of a submodule is inside the submodule, move the git directory of the submodule into its superproject's $GIT_DIR/modules path and then connect the git directory and its working directory by setting the core.worktree and adding a .git file pointing to the git directory embedded in the superprojects git directory.

A repository that was cloned independently and later added as a submodule or old setups have the submodules git directory inside the submodule instead of embedded into the superprojects git directory.

This command is recursive by default.

OPTIONS

-q , --quiet
Only print error messages.
--progress
This option is only valid for add and update commands. Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a terminal, unless -q is specified. This flag forces progress status even if the standard error stream is not directed to a terminal.
--all
This option is only valid for the deinit command. Unregister all submodules in the working tree.
-b <branch> , --branch <branch>
Branch of repository to add as submodule. The name of the branch is recorded as submodule.<name>.branch in .gitmodules for update --remote. A special value of . is used to indicate that the name of the branch in the submodule should be the same name as the current branch in the current repository. If the option is not specified, it defaults to the remote HEAD.
-f , --force
This option is only valid for add, deinit and update commands. When running add, allow adding an otherwise ignored submodule path. When running deinit the submodule working trees will be removed even if they contain local changes. When running update (only effective with the checkout procedure), throw away local changes in submodules when switching to a different commit; and always run a checkout operation in the submodule, even if the commit listed in the index of the containing repository matches the commit checked out in the submodule.
--cached
This option is only valid for status and summary commands. These commands typically use the commit found in the submodule HEAD, but with this option, the commit stored in the index is used instead.
--files
This option is only valid for the summary command. This command compares the commit in the index with that in the submodule HEAD when this option is used.
-n , --summary-limit
This option is only valid for the summary command. Limit the summary size (number of commits shown in total). Giving 0 will disable the summary; a negative number means unlimited (the default). This limit only applies to modified submodules. The size is always limited to 1 for added/deleted/typechanged submodules.
--remote

This option is only valid for the update command. Instead of using the superproject's recorded SHA-1 to update the submodule, use the status of the submodule's remote-tracking branch. The remote used is branch's remote (branch.<name>.remote), defaulting to origin. The remote branch used defaults to the remote HEAD, but the branch name may be overridden by setting the submodule.<name>.branch option in either .gitmodules or .git/config (with .git/config taking precedence).

This works for any of the supported update procedures (--checkout, --rebase, etc.). The only change is the source of the target SHA-1. For example, submodule update --remote --merge will merge upstream submodule changes into the submodules, while submodule update --merge will merge superproject gitlink changes into the submodules.

In order to ensure a current tracking branch state, update --remote fetches the submodule's remote repository before calculating the SHA-1. If you don't want to fetch, you should use submodule update --remote --no-fetch.

Use this option to integrate changes from the upstream subproject with your submodule's current HEAD. Alternatively, you can run git pull from the submodule, which is equivalent except for the remote branch name: update --remote uses the default upstream repository and submodule.<name>.branch, while git pull uses the submodule's branch.<name>.merge. Prefer submodule.<name>.branch if you want to distribute the default upstream branch with the superproject and branch.<name>.merge if you want a more native feel while working in the submodule itself.

-N , --no-fetch
This option is only valid for the update command. Don't fetch new objects from the remote site.
--checkout
This option is only valid for the update command. Checkout the commit recorded in the superproject on a detached HEAD in the submodule. This is the default behavior, the main use of this option is to override submodule.$name.update when set to a value other than checkout. If the key submodule.$name.update is either not explicitly set or set to checkout, this option is implicit.
--merge
This option is only valid for the update command. Merge the commit recorded in the superproject into the current branch of the submodule. If this option is given, the submodule's HEAD will not be detached. If a merge failure prevents this process, you will have to resolve the resulting conflicts within the submodule with the usual conflict resolution tools. If the key submodule.$name.update is set to merge, this option is implicit.
--rebase
This option is only valid for the update command. Rebase the current branch onto the commit recorded in the superproject. If this option is given, the submodule's HEAD will not be detached. If a merge failure prevents this process, you will have to resolve these failures with the section called “git-rebase(1)”. If the key submodule.$name.update is set to rebase, this option is implicit.
--init
This option is only valid for the update command. Initialize all submodules for which "git submodule init" has not been called so far before updating.
--name
This option is only valid for the add command. It sets the submodule's name to the given string instead of defaulting to its path. The name must be valid as a directory name and may not end with a /.
--reference <repository>

This option is only valid for add and update commands. These commands sometimes need to clone a remote repository. In this case, this option will be passed to the the section called “git-clone(1)” command.

NOTE: Do not use this option unless you have read the note for the section called “git-clone(1)”'s --reference, --shared, and --dissociate options carefully.

--dissociate

This option is only valid for add and update commands. These commands sometimes need to clone a remote repository. In this case, this option will be passed to the the section called “git-clone(1)” command.

NOTE: see the NOTE for the --reference option.

--recursive
This option is only valid for foreach, update, status and sync commands. Traverse submodules recursively. The operation is performed not only in the submodules of the current repo, but also in any nested submodules inside those submodules (and so on).
--depth
This option is valid for add and update commands. Create a shallow clone with a history truncated to the specified number of revisions. See the section called “git-clone(1)”
--[no-]recommend-shallow
This option is only valid for the update command. The initial clone of a submodule will use the recommended submodule.<name>.shallow as provided by the .gitmodules file by default. To ignore the suggestions use --no-recommend-shallow.
-j <n> , --jobs <n>
This option is only valid for the update command. Clone new submodules in parallel with as many jobs. Defaults to the submodule.fetchJobs option.
--[no-]single-branch
This option is only valid for the update command. Clone only one branch during update: HEAD or one specified by --branch.
<path>…
Paths to submodule(s). When specified this will restrict the command to only operate on the submodules found at the specified paths. (This argument is required with add).

FILES

When initializing submodules, a .gitmodules file in the top-level directory of the containing repository is used to find the url of each submodule. This file should be formatted in the same way as $GIT_DIR/config. The key to each submodule url is "submodule.$name.url". See the section called “gitmodules(5)” for details.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-svn(1)

NAME

git-svn - Bidirectional operation between a Subversion repository and Git

SYNOPSIS

git svn <command> [<options>] [<arguments>]

DESCRIPTION

git svn is a simple conduit for changesets between Subversion and Git. It provides a bidirectional flow of changes between a Subversion and a Git repository.

git svn can track a standard Subversion repository, following the common "trunk/branches/tags" layout, with the --stdlayout option. It can also follow branches and tags in any layout with the -T/-t/-b options (see options to init below, and also the clone command).

Once tracking a Subversion repository (with any of the above methods), the Git repository can be updated from Subversion by the fetch command and Subversion updated from Git by the dcommit command.

COMMANDS

init

Initializes an empty Git repository with additional metadata directories for git svn. The Subversion URL may be specified as a command-line argument, or as full URL arguments to -T/-t/-b. Optionally, the target directory to operate on can be specified as a second argument. Normally this command initializes the current directory.

-T<trunk-subdir> , --trunk=<trunk-subdir> , -t<tags-subdir> , --tags=<tags-subdir> , -b<branches-subdir> , --branches=<branches-subdir> , -s , --stdlayout
These are optional command-line options for init. Each of these flags can point to a relative repository path (--tags=project/tags) or a full url (--tags=https://foo.org/project/tags). You can specify more than one --tags and/or --branches options, in case your Subversion repository places tags or branches under multiple paths. The option --stdlayout is a shorthand way of setting trunk,tags,branches as the relative paths, which is the Subversion default. If any of the other options are given as well, they take precedence.
--no-metadata
Set the noMetadata option in the [svn-remote] config. This option is not recommended, please read the svn.noMetadata section of this manpage before using this option.
--use-svm-props
Set the useSvmProps option in the [svn-remote] config.
--use-svnsync-props
Set the useSvnsyncProps option in the [svn-remote] config.
--rewrite-root=<URL>
Set the rewriteRoot option in the [svn-remote] config.
--rewrite-uuid=<UUID>
Set the rewriteUUID option in the [svn-remote] config.
--username=<user>
For transports that SVN handles authentication for (http, https, and plain svn), specify the username. For other transports (e.g. svn+ssh://), you must include the username in the URL, e.g. svn+ssh://foo@svn.bar.com/project
--prefix=<prefix>

This allows one to specify a prefix which is prepended to the names of remotes if trunk/branches/tags are specified. The prefix does not automatically include a trailing slash, so be sure you include one in the argument if that is what you want. If --branches/-b is specified, the prefix must include a trailing slash. Setting a prefix (with a trailing slash) is strongly encouraged in any case, as your SVN-tracking refs will then be located at "refs/remotes/$prefix/", which is compatible with Git's own remote-tracking ref layout (refs/remotes/$remote/). Setting a prefix is also useful if you wish to track multiple projects that share a common repository. By default, the prefix is set to origin/.

Note

Before Git v2.0, the default prefix was "" (no prefix). This meant that SVN-tracking refs were put at "refs/remotes/*", which is incompatible with how Git's own remote-tracking refs are organized. If you still want the old default, you can get it by passing --prefix "" on the command line (--prefix="" may not work if your Perl's Getopt::Long is < v2.37).

--ignore-refs=<regex>
When passed to init or clone this regular expression will be preserved as a config key. See fetch for a description of --ignore-refs.
--ignore-paths=<regex>
When passed to init or clone this regular expression will be preserved as a config key. See fetch for a description of --ignore-paths.
--include-paths=<regex>
When passed to init or clone this regular expression will be preserved as a config key. See fetch for a description of --include-paths.
--no-minimize-url
When tracking multiple directories (using --stdlayout, --branches, or --tags options), git svn will attempt to connect to the root (or highest allowed level) of the Subversion repository. This default allows better tracking of history if entire projects are moved within a repository, but may cause issues on repositories where read access restrictions are in place. Passing --no-minimize-url will allow git svn to accept URLs as-is without attempting to connect to a higher level directory. This option is off by default when only one URL/branch is tracked (it would do little good).
fetch

Fetch unfetched revisions from the Subversion remote we are tracking. The name of the [svn-remote "…"] section in the $GIT_DIR/config file may be specified as an optional command-line argument.

This automatically updates the rev_map if needed (see $GIT_DIR/svn/**/.rev_map.* in the FILES section below for details).

--localtime

Store Git commit times in the local time zone instead of UTC. This makes git log (even without --date=local) show the same times that svn log would in the local time zone.

This doesn't interfere with interoperating with the Subversion repository you cloned from, but if you wish for your local Git repository to be able to interoperate with someone else's local Git repository, either don't use this option or you should both use it in the same local time zone.

--parent
Fetch only from the SVN parent of the current HEAD.
--ignore-refs=<regex>

Ignore refs for branches or tags matching the Perl regular expression. A "negative look-ahead assertion" like ^refs/remotes/origin/(?!tags/wanted-tag|wanted-branch).*$ can be used to allow only certain refs.

config key: svn-remote.<name>.ignore-refs

If the ignore-refs configuration key is set, and the command-line option is also given, both regular expressions will be used.

--ignore-paths=<regex>

This allows one to specify a Perl regular expression that will cause skipping of all matching paths from checkout from SVN. The --ignore-paths option should match for every fetch (including automatic fetches due to clone, dcommit, rebase, etc) on a given repository.

config key: svn-remote.<name>.ignore-paths

If the ignore-paths configuration key is set, and the command-line option is also given, both regular expressions will be used.

Examples:

Skip "doc*" directory for every fetch
--ignore-paths="^doc"
Skip "branches" and "tags" of first level directories
--ignore-paths="^[^/]+/(?:branches|tags)"
--include-paths=<regex>

This allows one to specify a Perl regular expression that will cause the inclusion of only matching paths from checkout from SVN. The --include-paths option should match for every fetch (including automatic fetches due to clone, dcommit, rebase, etc) on a given repository. --ignore-paths takes precedence over --include-paths.

config key: svn-remote.<name>.include-paths

--log-window-size=<n>
Fetch <n> log entries per request when scanning Subversion history. The default is 100. For very large Subversion repositories, larger values may be needed for clone/fetch to complete in reasonable time. But overly large values may lead to higher memory usage and request timeouts.
clone

Runs init and fetch. It will automatically create a directory based on the basename of the URL passed to it; or if a second argument is passed; it will create a directory and work within that. It accepts all arguments that the init and fetch commands accept; with the exception of --fetch-all and --parent. After a repository is cloned, the fetch command will be able to update revisions without affecting the working tree; and the rebase command will be able to update the working tree with the latest changes.

--preserve-empty-dirs
Create a placeholder file in the local Git repository for each empty directory fetched from Subversion. This includes directories that become empty by removing all entries in the Subversion repository (but not the directory itself). The placeholder files are also tracked and removed when no longer necessary.
--placeholder-filename=<filename>
Set the name of placeholder files created by --preserve-empty-dirs. Default: ".gitignore"
rebase

This fetches revisions from the SVN parent of the current HEAD and rebases the current (uncommitted to SVN) work against it.

This works similarly to svn update or git pull except that it preserves linear history with git rebase instead of git merge for ease of dcommitting with git svn.

This accepts all options that git svn fetch and git rebase accept. However, --fetch-all only fetches from the current [svn-remote], and not all [svn-remote] definitions.

Like git rebase; this requires that the working tree be clean and have no uncommitted changes.

This automatically updates the rev_map if needed (see $GIT_DIR/svn/**/.rev_map.* in the FILES section below for details).

-l , --local
Do not fetch remotely; only run git rebase against the last fetched commit from the upstream SVN.
dcommit

Commit each diff from the current branch directly to the SVN repository, and then rebase or reset (depending on whether or not there is a diff between SVN and head). This will create a revision in SVN for each commit in Git.

When an optional Git branch name (or a Git commit object name) is specified as an argument, the subcommand works on the specified branch, not on the current branch.

Use of dcommit is preferred to set-tree (below).

--no-rebase
After committing, do not rebase or reset.
--commit-url <URL>

Commit to this SVN URL (the full path). This is intended to allow existing git svn repositories created with one transport method (e.g. svn:// or http:// for anonymous read) to be reused if a user is later given access to an alternate transport method (e.g. svn+ssh:// or https://) for commit.

config key: svn-remote.<name>.commiturl
config key: svn.commiturl (overwrites all svn-remote.<name>.commiturl options)

Note that the SVN URL of the commiturl config key includes the SVN branch. If you rather want to set the commit URL for an entire SVN repository use svn-remote.<name>.pushurl instead.

Using this option for any other purpose (don't ask) is very strongly discouraged.

--mergeinfo=<mergeinfo>

Add the given merge information during the dcommit (e.g. --mergeinfo="/branches/foo:1-10"). All svn server versions can store this information (as a property), and svn clients starting from version 1.5 can make use of it. To specify merge information from multiple branches, use a single space character between the branches (--mergeinfo="/branches/foo:1-10 /branches/bar:3,5-6,8")

config key: svn.pushmergeinfo

This option will cause git-svn to attempt to automatically populate the svn:mergeinfo property in the SVN repository when possible. Currently, this can only be done when dcommitting non-fast-forward merges where all parents but the first have already been pushed into SVN.

--interactive

Ask the user to confirm that a patch set should actually be sent to SVN. For each patch, one may answer "yes" (accept this patch), "no" (discard this patch), "all" (accept all patches), or "quit".

git svn dcommit returns immediately if answer is "no" or "quit", without committing anything to SVN.

branch

Create a branch in the SVN repository.

-m , --message
Allows to specify the commit message.
-t , --tag
Create a tag by using the tags_subdir instead of the branches_subdir specified during git svn init.
-d<path> , --destination=<path>

If more than one --branches (or --tags) option was given to the init or clone command, you must provide the location of the branch (or tag) you wish to create in the SVN repository. <path> specifies which path to use to create the branch or tag and should match the pattern on the left-hand side of one of the configured branches or tags refspecs. You can see these refspecs with the commands

git config --get-all svn-remote.<name>.branches
git config --get-all svn-remote.<name>.tags

where <name> is the name of the SVN repository as specified by the -R option to init (or "svn" by default).

--username
Specify the SVN username to perform the commit as. This option overrides the username configuration property.
--commit-url

Use the specified URL to connect to the destination Subversion repository. This is useful in cases where the source SVN repository is read-only. This option overrides configuration property commiturl.

git config --get-all svn-remote.<name>.commiturl
--parents
Create parent folders. This parameter is equivalent to the parameter --parents on svn cp commands and is useful for non-standard repository layouts.
tag
Create a tag in the SVN repository. This is a shorthand for branch -t.
log

This should make it easy to look up svn log messages when svn users refer to -r/--revision numbers.

The following features from svn log are supported:

-r <n>[:<n>] , --revision=<n>[:<n>]
is supported, non-numeric args are not: HEAD, NEXT, BASE, PREV, etc …
-v , --verbose
it's not completely compatible with the --verbose output in svn log, but reasonably close.
--limit=<n>
is NOT the same as --max-count, doesn't count merged/excluded commits
--incremental
supported

New features:

--show-commit
shows the Git commit sha1, as well
--oneline
our version of --pretty=oneline

Note

SVN itself only stores times in UTC and nothing else. The regular svn client converts the UTC time to the local time (or based on the TZ= environment). This command has the same behaviour.

Any other arguments are passed directly to git log

blame

Show what revision and author last modified each line of a file. The output of this mode is format-compatible with the output of svn blame by default. Like the SVN blame command, local uncommitted changes in the working tree are ignored; the version of the file in the HEAD revision is annotated. Unknown arguments are passed directly to git blame.

--git-format
Produce output in the same format as git blame, but with SVN revision numbers instead of Git commit hashes. In this mode, changes that haven't been committed to SVN (including local working-copy edits) are shown as revision 0.
find-rev

When given an SVN revision number of the form rN, returns the corresponding Git commit hash (this can optionally be followed by a tree-ish to specify which branch should be searched). When given a tree-ish, returns the corresponding SVN revision number.

-B , --before
Don't require an exact match if given an SVN revision, instead find the commit corresponding to the state of the SVN repository (on the current branch) at the specified revision.
-A , --after
Don't require an exact match if given an SVN revision; if there is not an exact match return the closest match searching forward in the history.
set-tree
You should consider using dcommit instead of this command. Commit specified commit or tree objects to SVN. This relies on your imported fetch data being up to date. This makes absolutely no attempts to do patching when committing to SVN, it simply overwrites files with those specified in the tree or commit. All merging is assumed to have taken place independently of git svn functions.
create-ignore
Recursively finds the svn:ignore and svn:global-ignores properties on directories and creates matching .gitignore files. The resulting files are staged to be committed, but are not committed. Use -r/--revision to refer to a specific revision.
show-ignore
Recursively finds and lists the svn:ignore and svn:global-ignores properties on directories. The output is suitable for appending to the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file.
mkdirs
Attempts to recreate empty directories that core Git cannot track based on information in $GIT_DIR/svn/<refname>/unhandled.log files. Empty directories are automatically recreated when using "git svn clone" and "git svn rebase", so "mkdirs" is intended for use after commands like "git checkout" or "git reset". (See the svn-remote.<name>.automkdirs config file option for more information.)
commit-diff

Commits the diff of two tree-ish arguments from the command-line. This command does not rely on being inside a git svn init-ed repository. This command takes three arguments, (a) the original tree to diff against, (b) the new tree result, (c) the URL of the target Subversion repository. The final argument (URL) may be omitted if you are working from a git svn-aware repository (that has been init-ed with git svn). The -r<revision> option is required for this.

The commit message is supplied either directly with the -m or -F option, or indirectly from the tag or commit when the second tree-ish denotes such an object, or it is requested by invoking an editor (see --edit option below).

-m <msg> , --message=<msg>
Use the given msg as the commit message. This option disables the --edit option.
-F <filename> , --file=<filename>
Take the commit message from the given file. This option disables the --edit option.
info
Shows information about a file or directory similar to what svn info provides. Does not currently support a -r/--revision argument. Use the --url option to output only the value of the URL: field.
proplist
Lists the properties stored in the Subversion repository about a given file or directory. Use -r/--revision to refer to a specific Subversion revision.
propget
Gets the Subversion property given as the first argument, for a file. A specific revision can be specified with -r/--revision.
propset

Sets the Subversion property given as the first argument, to the value given as the second argument for the file given as the third argument.

Example:

git svn propset svn:keywords "FreeBSD=%H" devel/py-tipper/Makefile

This will set the property svn:keywords to FreeBSD=%H for the file devel/py-tipper/Makefile.

show-externals
Shows the Subversion externals. Use -r/--revision to specify a specific revision.
gc
Compress $GIT_DIR/svn/<refname>/unhandled.log files and remove $GIT_DIR/svn/<refname>/index files.
reset

Undoes the effects of fetch back to the specified revision. This allows you to re-fetch an SVN revision. Normally the contents of an SVN revision should never change and reset should not be necessary. However, if SVN permissions change, or if you alter your --ignore-paths option, a fetch may fail with "not found in commit" (file not previously visible) or "checksum mismatch" (missed a modification). If the problem file cannot be ignored forever (with --ignore-paths) the only way to repair the repo is to use reset.

Only the rev_map and refs/remotes/git-svn are changed (see $GIT_DIR/svn/**/.rev_map.* in the FILES section below for details). Follow reset with a fetch and then git reset or git rebase to move local branches onto the new tree.

-r <n> , --revision=<n>
Specify the most recent revision to keep. All later revisions are discarded.
-p , --parent
Discard the specified revision as well, keeping the nearest parent instead.
Example:

Assume you have local changes in "master", but you need to refetch "r2".

    r1---r2---r3 remotes/git-svn
                \
                 A---B master

Fix the ignore-paths or SVN permissions problem that caused "r2" to be incomplete in the first place. Then:

git svn reset -r2 -p
git svn fetch

    r1---r2'--r3' remotes/git-svn
      \
       r2---r3---A---B master

Then fixup "master" with git rebase. Do NOT use git merge or your history will not be compatible with a future dcommit!

git rebase --onto remotes/git-svn A^ master

    r1---r2'--r3' remotes/git-svn
                \
                 A'--B' master

OPTIONS

--shared[=(false|true|umask|group|all|world|everybody)] , --template=<template-directory>
Only used with the init command. These are passed directly to git init.
-r <arg> , --revision <arg>

Used with the fetch command.

This allows revision ranges for partial/cauterized history to be supported. $NUMBER, $NUMBER1:$NUMBER2 (numeric ranges), $NUMBER:HEAD, and BASE:$NUMBER are all supported.

This can allow you to make partial mirrors when running fetch; but is generally not recommended because history will be skipped and lost.

- , --stdin

Only used with the set-tree command.

Read a list of commits from stdin and commit them in reverse order. Only the leading sha1 is read from each line, so git rev-list --pretty=oneline output can be used.

--rmdir

Only used with the dcommit, set-tree and commit-diff commands.

Remove directories from the SVN tree if there are no files left behind. SVN can version empty directories, and they are not removed by default if there are no files left in them. Git cannot version empty directories. Enabling this flag will make the commit to SVN act like Git.

config key: svn.rmdir

-e , --edit

Only used with the dcommit, set-tree and commit-diff commands.

Edit the commit message before committing to SVN. This is off by default for objects that are commits, and forced on when committing tree objects.

config key: svn.edit

-l<num> , --find-copies-harder

Only used with the dcommit, set-tree and commit-diff commands.

They are both passed directly to git diff-tree; see the section called “git-diff-tree(1)” for more information.

config key: svn.l
config key: svn.findcopiesharder

-A<filename> , --authors-file=<filename>

Syntax is compatible with the file used by git cvsimport but an empty email address can be supplied with <>:

        loginname = Joe User <user@example.com>

If this option is specified and git svn encounters an SVN committer name that does not exist in the authors-file, git svn will abort operation. The user will then have to add the appropriate entry. Re-running the previous git svn command after the authors-file is modified should continue operation.

config key: svn.authorsfile

--authors-prog=<filename>

If this option is specified, for each SVN committer name that does not exist in the authors file, the given file is executed with the committer name as the first argument. The program is expected to return a single line of the form "Name <email>" or "Name <>", which will be treated as if included in the authors file.

Due to historical reasons a relative filename is first searched relative to the current directory for init and clone and relative to the root of the working tree for fetch. If filename is not found, it is searched like any other command in $PATH.

config key: svn.authorsProg

-q , --quiet
Make git svn less verbose. Specify a second time to make it even less verbose.
-m , --merge , -s<strategy> , --strategy=<strategy> , -p , --rebase-merges

These are only used with the dcommit and rebase commands.

Passed directly to git rebase when using dcommit if a git reset cannot be used (see dcommit).

-n , --dry-run

This can be used with the dcommit, rebase, branch and tag commands.

For dcommit, print out the series of Git arguments that would show which diffs would be committed to SVN.

For rebase, display the local branch associated with the upstream svn repository associated with the current branch and the URL of svn repository that will be fetched from.

For branch and tag, display the urls that will be used for copying when creating the branch or tag.

--use-log-author

When retrieving svn commits into Git (as part of fetch, rebase, or dcommit operations), look for the first From: line or Signed-off-by trailer in the log message and use that as the author string.

config key: svn.useLogAuthor

--add-author-from

When committing to svn from Git (as part of set-tree or dcommit operations), if the existing log message doesn't already have a From: or Signed-off-by trailer, append a From: line based on the Git commit's author string. If you use this, then --use-log-author will retrieve a valid author string for all commits.

config key: svn.addAuthorFrom

ADVANCED OPTIONS

-i<GIT_SVN_ID> , --id <GIT_SVN_ID>
This sets GIT_SVN_ID (instead of using the environment). This allows the user to override the default refname to fetch from when tracking a single URL. The log and dcommit commands no longer require this switch as an argument.
-R<remote-name> , --svn-remote <remote-name>
Specify the [svn-remote "<remote-name>"] section to use, this allows SVN multiple repositories to be tracked. Default: "svn"
--follow-parent

This option is only relevant if we are tracking branches (using one of the repository layout options --trunk, --tags, --branches, --stdlayout). For each tracked branch, try to find out where its revision was copied from, and set a suitable parent in the first Git commit for the branch. This is especially helpful when we're tracking a directory that has been moved around within the repository. If this feature is disabled, the branches created by git svn will all be linear and not share any history, meaning that there will be no information on where branches were branched off or merged. However, following long/convoluted histories can take a long time, so disabling this feature may speed up the cloning process. This feature is enabled by default, use --no-follow-parent to disable it.

config key: svn.followparent

CONFIG FILE-ONLY OPTIONS

svn.noMetadata , svn-remote.<name>.noMetadata

This gets rid of the git-svn-id: lines at the end of every commit.

This option can only be used for one-shot imports as git svn will not be able to fetch again without metadata. Additionally, if you lose your $GIT_DIR/svn/**/.rev_map.* files, git svn will not be able to rebuild them.

The git svn log command will not work on repositories using this, either. Using this conflicts with the useSvmProps option for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

This option is NOT recommended as it makes it difficult to track down old references to SVN revision numbers in existing documentation, bug reports, and archives. If you plan to eventually migrate from SVN to Git and are certain about dropping SVN history, consider git-filter-repo instead. filter-repo also allows reformatting of metadata for ease-of-reading and rewriting authorship info for non-"svn.authorsFile" users.

svn.useSvmProps , svn-remote.<name>.useSvmProps

This allows git svn to re-map repository URLs and UUIDs from mirrors created using SVN::Mirror (or svk) for metadata.

If an SVN revision has a property, "svm:headrev", it is likely that the revision was created by SVN::Mirror (also used by SVK). The property contains a repository UUID and a revision. We want to make it look like we are mirroring the original URL, so introduce a helper function that returns the original identity URL and UUID, and use it when generating metadata in commit messages.

svn.useSvnsyncProps , svn-remote.<name>.useSvnsyncprops
Similar to the useSvmProps option; this is for users of the svnsync(1) command distributed with SVN 1.4.x and later.
svn-remote.<name>.rewriteRoot
This allows users to create repositories from alternate URLs. For example, an administrator could run git svn on the server locally (accessing via file://) but wish to distribute the repository with a public http:// or svn:// URL in the metadata so users of it will see the public URL.
svn-remote.<name>.rewriteUUID
Similar to the useSvmProps option; this is for users who need to remap the UUID manually. This may be useful in situations where the original UUID is not available via either useSvmProps or useSvnsyncProps.
svn-remote.<name>.pushurl
Similar to Git's remote.<name>.pushurl, this key is designed to be used in cases where url points to an SVN repository via a read-only transport, to provide an alternate read/write transport. It is assumed that both keys point to the same repository. Unlike commiturl, pushurl is a base path. If either commiturl or pushurl could be used, commiturl takes precedence.
svn.brokenSymlinkWorkaround
This disables potentially expensive checks to workaround broken symlinks checked into SVN by broken clients. Set this option to "false" if you track a SVN repository with many empty blobs that are not symlinks. This option may be changed while git svn is running and take effect on the next revision fetched. If unset, git svn assumes this option to be "true".
svn.pathnameencoding
This instructs git svn to recode pathnames to a given encoding. It can be used by windows users and by those who work in non-utf8 locales to avoid corrupted file names with non-ASCII characters. Valid encodings are the ones supported by Perl's Encode module.
svn-remote.<name>.automkdirs
Normally, the "git svn clone" and "git svn rebase" commands attempt to recreate empty directories that are in the Subversion repository. If this option is set to "false", then empty directories will only be created if the "git svn mkdirs" command is run explicitly. If unset, git svn assumes this option to be "true".

Since the noMetadata, rewriteRoot, rewriteUUID, useSvnsyncProps and useSvmProps options all affect the metadata generated and used by git svn; they must be set in the configuration file before any history is imported and these settings should never be changed once they are set.

Additionally, only one of these options can be used per svn-remote section because they affect the git-svn-id: metadata line, except for rewriteRoot and rewriteUUID which can be used together.

BASIC EXAMPLES

Tracking and contributing to the trunk of a Subversion-managed project (ignoring tags and branches):

# Clone a repo (like git clone):
        git svn clone http://svn.example.com/project/trunk
# Enter the newly cloned directory:
        cd trunk
# You should be on master branch, double-check with 'git branch'
        git branch
# Do some work and commit locally to Git:
        git commit ...
# Something is committed to SVN, rebase your local changes against the
# latest changes in SVN:
        git svn rebase
# Now commit your changes (that were committed previously using Git) to SVN,
# as well as automatically updating your working HEAD:
        git svn dcommit
# Append svn:ignore and svn:global-ignores settings to the default Git exclude file:
        git svn show-ignore >> .git/info/exclude

Tracking and contributing to an entire Subversion-managed project (complete with a trunk, tags and branches):

# Clone a repo with standard SVN directory layout (like git clone):
        git svn clone http://svn.example.com/project --stdlayout --prefix svn/
# Or, if the repo uses a non-standard directory layout:
        git svn clone http://svn.example.com/project -T tr -b branch -t tag --prefix svn/
# View all branches and tags you have cloned:
        git branch -r
# Create a new branch in SVN
        git svn branch waldo
# Reset your master to trunk (or any other branch, replacing 'trunk'
# with the appropriate name):
        git reset --hard svn/trunk
# You may only dcommit to one branch/tag/trunk at a time.  The usage
# of dcommit/rebase/show-ignore should be the same as above.

The initial git svn clone can be quite time-consuming (especially for large Subversion repositories). If multiple people (or one person with multiple machines) want to use git svn to interact with the same Subversion repository, you can do the initial git svn clone to a repository on a server and have each person clone that repository with git clone:

# Do the initial import on a server
        ssh server "cd /pub && git svn clone http://svn.example.com/project [options...]"
# Clone locally - make sure the refs/remotes/ space matches the server
        mkdir project
        cd project
        git init
        git remote add origin server:/pub/project
        git config --replace-all remote.origin.fetch '+refs/remotes/*:refs/remotes/*'
        git fetch
# Prevent fetch/pull from remote Git server in the future,
# we only want to use git svn for future updates
        git config --remove-section remote.origin
# Create a local branch from one of the branches just fetched
        git checkout -b master FETCH_HEAD
# Initialize 'git svn' locally (be sure to use the same URL and
# --stdlayout/-T/-b/-t/--prefix options as were used on server)
        git svn init http://svn.example.com/project [options...]
# Pull the latest changes from Subversion
        git svn rebase

REBASE VS. PULL/MERGE

Prefer to use git svn rebase or git rebase, rather than git pull or git merge to synchronize unintegrated commits with a git svn branch. Doing so will keep the history of unintegrated commits linear with respect to the upstream SVN repository and allow the use of the preferred git svn dcommit subcommand to push unintegrated commits back into SVN.

Originally, git svn recommended that developers pulled or merged from the git svn branch. This was because the author favored git svn set-tree B to commit a single head rather than the git svn set-tree A..B notation to commit multiple commits. Use of git pull or git merge with git svn set-tree A..B will cause non-linear history to be flattened when committing into SVN and this can lead to merge commits unexpectedly reversing previous commits in SVN.

MERGE TRACKING

While git svn can track copy history (including branches and tags) for repositories adopting a standard layout, it cannot yet represent merge history that happened inside git back upstream to SVN users. Therefore it is advised that users keep history as linear as possible inside Git to ease compatibility with SVN (see the CAVEATS section below).

HANDLING OF SVN BRANCHES

If git svn is configured to fetch branches (and --follow-branches is in effect), it sometimes creates multiple Git branches for one SVN branch, where the additional branches have names of the form branchname@nnn (with nnn an SVN revision number). These additional branches are created if git svn cannot find a parent commit for the first commit in an SVN branch, to connect the branch to the history of the other branches.

Normally, the first commit in an SVN branch consists of a copy operation. git svn will read this commit to get the SVN revision the branch was created from. It will then try to find the Git commit that corresponds to this SVN revision, and use that as the parent of the branch. However, it is possible that there is no suitable Git commit to serve as parent. This will happen, among other reasons, if the SVN branch is a copy of a revision that was not fetched by git svn (e.g. because it is an old revision that was skipped with --revision), or if in SVN a directory was copied that is not tracked by git svn (such as a branch that is not tracked at all, or a subdirectory of a tracked branch). In these cases, git svn will still create a Git branch, but instead of using an existing Git commit as the parent of the branch, it will read the SVN history of the directory the branch was copied from and create appropriate Git commits. This is indicated by the message "Initializing parent: <branchname>".

Additionally, it will create a special branch named <branchname>@<SVN-Revision>, where <SVN-Revision> is the SVN revision number the branch was copied from. This branch will point to the newly created parent commit of the branch. If in SVN the branch was deleted and later recreated from a different version, there will be multiple such branches with an @.

Note that this may mean that multiple Git commits are created for a single SVN revision.

An example: in an SVN repository with a standard trunk/tags/branches layout, a directory trunk/sub is created in r.100. In r.200, trunk/sub is branched by copying it to branches/. git svn clone -s will then create a branch sub. It will also create new Git commits for r.100 through r.199 and use these as the history of branch sub. Thus there will be two Git commits for each revision from r.100 to r.199 (one containing trunk/, one containing trunk/sub/). Finally, it will create a branch sub@200 pointing to the new parent commit of branch sub (i.e. the commit for r.200 and trunk/sub/).

CAVEATS

For the sake of simplicity and interoperating with Subversion, it is recommended that all git svn users clone, fetch and dcommit directly from the SVN server, and avoid all git clone/pull/merge/push operations between Git repositories and branches. The recommended method of exchanging code between Git branches and users is git format-patch and git am, or just 'dcommit'ing to the SVN repository.

Running git merge or git pull is NOT recommended on a branch you plan to dcommit from because Subversion users cannot see any merges you've made. Furthermore, if you merge or pull from a Git branch that is a mirror of an SVN branch, dcommit may commit to the wrong branch.

If you do merge, note the following rule: git svn dcommit will attempt to commit on top of the SVN commit named in

git log --grep=^git-svn-id: --first-parent -1

You must therefore ensure that the most recent commit of the branch you want to dcommit to is the first parent of the merge. Chaos will ensue otherwise, especially if the first parent is an older commit on the same SVN branch.

git clone does not clone branches under the refs/remotes/ hierarchy or any git svn metadata, or config. So repositories created and managed with using git svn should use rsync for cloning, if cloning is to be done at all.

Since dcommit uses rebase internally, any Git branches you git push to before dcommit on will require forcing an overwrite of the existing ref on the remote repository. This is generally considered bad practice, see the the section called “git-push(1)” documentation for details.

Do not use the --amend option of the section called “git-commit(1)” on a change you've already dcommitted. It is considered bad practice to --amend commits you've already pushed to a remote repository for other users, and dcommit with SVN is analogous to that.

When cloning an SVN repository, if none of the options for describing the repository layout is used (--trunk, --tags, --branches, --stdlayout), git svn clone will create a Git repository with completely linear history, where branches and tags appear as separate directories in the working copy. While this is the easiest way to get a copy of a complete repository, for projects with many branches it will lead to a working copy many times larger than just the trunk. Thus for projects using the standard directory structure (trunk/branches/tags), it is recommended to clone with option --stdlayout. If the project uses a non-standard structure, and/or if branches and tags are not required, it is easiest to only clone one directory (typically trunk), without giving any repository layout options. If the full history with branches and tags is required, the options --trunk / --branches / --tags must be used.

When using multiple --branches or --tags, git svn does not automatically handle name collisions (for example, if two branches from different paths have the same name, or if a branch and a tag have the same name). In these cases, use init to set up your Git repository then, before your first fetch, edit the $GIT_DIR/config file so that the branches and tags are associated with different name spaces. For example:

branches = stable/*:refs/remotes/svn/stable/*
branches = debug/*:refs/remotes/svn/debug/*

CONFIGURATION

git svn stores [svn-remote] configuration information in the repository $GIT_DIR/config file. It is similar the core Git [remote] sections except fetch keys do not accept glob arguments; but they are instead handled by the branches and tags keys. Since some SVN repositories are oddly configured with multiple projects glob expansions such those listed below are allowed:

[svn-remote "project-a"]
        url = http://server.org/svn
        fetch = trunk/project-a:refs/remotes/project-a/trunk
        branches = branches/*/project-a:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*
        branches = branches/release_*:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/release_*
        branches = branches/re*se:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*
        tags = tags/*/project-a:refs/remotes/project-a/tags/*

Keep in mind that the * (asterisk) wildcard of the local ref (right of the :) must be the farthest right path component; however the remote wildcard may be anywhere as long as it's an independent path component (surrounded by / or EOL). This type of configuration is not automatically created by init and should be manually entered with a text-editor or using git config.

Also note that only one asterisk is allowed per word. For example:

branches = branches/re*se:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*

will match branches release, rese, re123se, however

branches = branches/re*s*e:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*

will produce an error.

It is also possible to fetch a subset of branches or tags by using a comma-separated list of names within braces. For example:

[svn-remote "huge-project"]
        url = http://server.org/svn
        fetch = trunk/src:refs/remotes/trunk
        branches = branches/{red,green}/src:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*
        tags = tags/{1.0,2.0}/src:refs/remotes/project-a/tags/*

Multiple fetch, branches, and tags keys are supported:

[svn-remote "messy-repo"]
        url = http://server.org/svn
        fetch = trunk/project-a:refs/remotes/project-a/trunk
        fetch = branches/demos/june-project-a-demo:refs/remotes/project-a/demos/june-demo
        branches = branches/server/*:refs/remotes/project-a/branches/*
        branches = branches/demos/2011/*:refs/remotes/project-a/2011-demos/*
        tags = tags/server/*:refs/remotes/project-a/tags/*

Creating a branch in such a configuration requires disambiguating which location to use using the -d or --destination flag:

$ git svn branch -d branches/server release-2-3-0

Note that git-svn keeps track of the highest revision in which a branch or tag has appeared. If the subset of branches or tags is changed after fetching, then $GIT_DIR/svn/.metadata must be manually edited to remove (or reset) branches-maxRev and/or tags-maxRev as appropriate.

FILES

$GIT_DIR/svn/**/.rev_map.*

Mapping between Subversion revision numbers and Git commit names. In a repository where the noMetadata option is not set, this can be rebuilt from the git-svn-id: lines that are at the end of every commit (see the svn.noMetadata section above for details).

git svn fetch and git svn rebase automatically update the rev_map if it is missing or not up to date. git svn reset automatically rewinds it.

BUGS

We ignore all SVN properties except svn:executable. Any unhandled properties are logged to $GIT_DIR/svn/<refname>/unhandled.log

Renamed and copied directories are not detected by Git and hence not tracked when committing to SVN. I do not plan on adding support for this as it's quite difficult and time-consuming to get working for all the possible corner cases (Git doesn't do it, either). Committing renamed and copied files is fully supported if they're similar enough for Git to detect them.

In SVN, it is possible (though discouraged) to commit changes to a tag (because a tag is just a directory copy, thus technically the same as a branch). When cloning an SVN repository, git svn cannot know if such a commit to a tag will happen in the future. Thus it acts conservatively and imports all SVN tags as branches, prefixing the tag name with tags/.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-symbolic-ref(1)

NAME

git-symbolic-ref - Read, modify and delete symbolic refs

SYNOPSIS

git symbolic-ref [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
git symbolic-ref [-q] [--short] [--no-recurse] <name>
git symbolic-ref --delete [-q] <name>

DESCRIPTION

Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref refers to and outputs its path, relative to the .git/ directory. Typically you would give HEAD as the <name> argument to see which branch your working tree is on.

Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to point at the given branch <ref>.

Given --delete and an additional argument, deletes the given symbolic ref.

A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that begins with ref: refs/. For example, your .git/HEAD is a regular file whose content is ref: refs/heads/master.

OPTIONS

-d , --delete
Delete the symbolic ref <name>.
-q , --quiet
Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a symbolic ref but a detached HEAD; instead exit with non-zero status silently.
--short
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, try to shorten the value, e.g. from refs/heads/master to master.
--recurse , --no-recurse
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, if <name> refers to another symbolic ref, follow such a chain of symbolic refs until the result no longer points at a symbolic ref (--recurse, which is the default). --no-recurse stops after dereferencing only a single level of symbolic ref.
-m
Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only when creating or updating a symbolic ref.

NOTES

In the past, .git/HEAD was a symbolic link pointing at refs/heads/master. When we wanted to switch to another branch, we did ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD, and when we wanted to find out which branch we are on, we did readlink .git/HEAD. But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by default.

git symbolic-ref will exit with status 0 if the contents of the symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested name is not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error occurs.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-tag(1)

NAME

git-tag - Create, list, delete or verify a tag object signed with GPG

SYNOPSIS

git tag [-a | -s | -u <key-id>] [-f] [-m <msg> | -F <file>] [-e]
        [(--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>])…]
        <tagname> [<commit> | <object>]
git tag -d <tagname>…
git tag [-n[<num>]] -l [--contains <commit>] [--no-contains <commit>]
        [--points-at <object>] [--column[=<options>] | --no-column]
        [--create-reflog] [--sort=<key>] [--format=<format>]
        [--merged <commit>] [--no-merged <commit>] [<pattern>…]
git tag -v [--format=<format>] <tagname>…

DESCRIPTION

Add a tag reference in refs/tags/, unless -d/-l/-v is given to delete, list or verify tags.

Unless -f is given, the named tag must not yet exist.

If one of -a, -s, or -u <key-id> is passed, the command creates a tag object, and requires a tag message. Unless -m <msg> or -F <file> is given, an editor is started for the user to type in the tag message.

If -m <msg> or -F <file> or --trailer <token>[=<value>] is given and -a, -s, and -u <key-id> are absent, -a is implied.

Otherwise, a tag reference that points directly at the given object (i.e., a lightweight tag) is created.

A GnuPG signed tag object will be created when -s or -u <key-id> is used. When -u <key-id> is not used, the committer identity for the current user is used to find the GnuPG key for signing. The configuration variable gpg.program is used to specify custom GnuPG binary.

Tag objects (created with -a, -s, or -u) are called "annotated" tags; they contain a creation date, the tagger name and e-mail, a tagging message, and an optional GnuPG signature. Whereas a "lightweight" tag is simply a name for an object (usually a commit object).

Annotated tags are meant for release while lightweight tags are meant for private or temporary object labels. For this reason, some git commands for naming objects (like git describe) will ignore lightweight tags by default.

OPTIONS

-a , --annotate
Make an unsigned, annotated tag object
-s , --sign
Make a GPG-signed tag, using the default e-mail address's key. The default behavior of tag GPG-signing is controlled by tag.gpgSign configuration variable if it exists, or disabled otherwise. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--no-sign
Override tag.gpgSign configuration variable that is set to force each and every tag to be signed.
-u <key-id> , --local-user=<key-id>
Make a GPG-signed tag, using the given key.
-f , --force
Replace an existing tag with the given name (instead of failing)
-d , --delete
Delete existing tags with the given names.
-v , --verify
Verify the GPG signature of the given tag names.
-n<num>

<num> specifies how many lines from the annotation, if any, are printed when using -l. Implies --list.

The default is not to print any annotation lines. If no number is given to -n, only the first line is printed. If the tag is not annotated, the commit message is displayed instead.

-l , --list

List tags. With optional <pattern>..., e.g. git tag --list 'v-*', list only the tags that match the pattern(s).

Running "git tag" without arguments also lists all tags. The pattern is a shell wildcard (i.e., matched using fnmatch(3)). Multiple patterns may be given; if any of them matches, the tag is shown.

This option is implicitly supplied if any other list-like option such as --contains is provided. See the documentation for each of those options for details.

--sort=<key>
Sort based on the key given. Prefix - to sort in descending order of the value. You may use the --sort=<key> option multiple times, in which case the last key becomes the primary key. Also supports "version:refname" or "v:refname" (tag names are treated as versions). The "version:refname" sort order can also be affected by the "versionsort.suffix" configuration variable. The keys supported are the same as those in git for-each-ref. Sort order defaults to the value configured for the tag.sort variable if it exists, or lexicographic order otherwise. See the section called “git-config(1)”.
--color[=<when>]
Respect any colors specified in the --format option. The <when> field must be one of always, never, or auto (if <when> is absent, behave as if always was given).
-i , --ignore-case
Sorting and filtering tags are case insensitive.
--omit-empty
Do not print a newline after formatted refs where the format expands to the empty string.
--column[=<options>] , --no-column

Display tag listing in columns. See configuration variable column.tag for option syntax. --column and --no-column without options are equivalent to always and never respectively.

This option is only applicable when listing tags without annotation lines.

--contains [<commit>]
Only list tags which contain the specified commit (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--no-contains [<commit>]
Only list tags which don't contain the specified commit (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
--merged [<commit>]
Only list tags whose commits are reachable from the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--no-merged [<commit>]
Only list tags whose commits are not reachable from the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).
--points-at <object>
Only list tags of the given object (HEAD if not specified). Implies --list.
-m <msg> , --message=<msg>
Use the given tag message (instead of prompting). If multiple -m options are given, their values are concatenated as separate paragraphs. Implies -a if none of -a, -s, or -u <key-id> is given.
-F <file> , --file=<file>
Take the tag message from the given file. Use - to read the message from the standard input. Implies -a if none of -a, -s, or -u <key-id> is given.
--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>]
Specify a (<token>, <value>) pair that should be applied as a trailer. (e.g. git tag --trailer "Custom-Key: value" will add a "Custom-Key" trailer to the tag message.) The trailer.* configuration variables (the section called “git-interpret-trailers(1)”) can be used to define if a duplicated trailer is omitted, where in the run of trailers each trailer would appear, and other details. The trailers can be extracted in git tag --list, using --format="%(trailers)" placeholder.
-e , --edit
The message taken from file with -F and command line with -m are usually used as the tag message unmodified. This option lets you further edit the message taken from these sources.
--cleanup=<mode>
This option sets how the tag message is cleaned up. The <mode> can be one of verbatim, whitespace and strip. The strip mode is default. The verbatim mode does not change message at all, whitespace removes just leading/trailing whitespace lines and strip removes both whitespace and commentary.
--create-reflog
Create a reflog for the tag. To globally enable reflogs for tags, see core.logAllRefUpdates in the section called “git-config(1)”. The negated form --no-create-reflog only overrides an earlier --create-reflog, but currently does not negate the setting of core.logAllRefUpdates.
--format=<format>
A string that interpolates %(fieldname) from a tag ref being shown and the object it points at. The format is the same as that of the section called “git-for-each-ref(1)”. When unspecified, defaults to %(refname:strip=2).
<tagname>
The name of the tag to create, delete, or describe. The new tag name must pass all checks defined by the section called “git-check-ref-format(1)”. Some of these checks may restrict the characters allowed in a tag name.
<commit> , <object>
The object that the new tag will refer to, usually a commit. Defaults to HEAD.

CONFIGURATION

By default, git tag in sign-with-default mode (-s) will use your committer identity (of the form Your Name <your@email.address>) to find a key. If you want to use a different default key, you can specify it in the repository configuration as follows:

[user]
    signingKey = <gpg-key-id>

pager.tag is only respected when listing tags, i.e., when -l is used or implied. The default is to use a pager. See the section called “git-config(1)”.

DISCUSSION

On Re-tagging

What should you do when you tag a wrong commit and you would want to re-tag?

If you never pushed anything out, just re-tag it. Use "-f" to replace the old one. And you're done.

But if you have pushed things out (or others could just read your repository directly), then others will have already seen the old tag. In that case you can do one of two things:

  1. The sane thing. Just admit you screwed up, and use a different name. Others have already seen one tag-name, and if you keep the same name, you may be in the situation that two people both have "version X", but they actually have different "X"'s. So just call it "X.1" and be done with it.
  2. The insane thing. You really want to call the new version "X" too, even though others have already seen the old one. So just use git tag -f again, as if you hadn't already published the old one.

However, Git does not (and it should not) change tags behind users back. So if somebody already got the old tag, doing a git pull on your tree shouldn't just make them overwrite the old one.

If somebody got a release tag from you, you cannot just change the tag for them by updating your own one. This is a big security issue, in that people MUST be able to trust their tag-names. If you really want to do the insane thing, you need to just fess up to it, and tell people that you messed up. You can do that by making a very public announcement saying:

Ok, I messed up, and I pushed out an earlier version tagged as X. I
then fixed something, and retagged the *fixed* tree as X again.

If you got the wrong tag, and want the new one, please delete
the old one and fetch the new one by doing:

        git tag -d X
        git fetch origin tag X

to get my updated tag.

You can test which tag you have by doing

        git rev-parse X

which should return 0123456789abcdef.. if you have the new version.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Does this seem a bit complicated? It should be. There is no way that it would be correct to just "fix" it automatically. People need to know that their tags might have been changed.

On Automatic following

If you are following somebody else's tree, you are most likely using remote-tracking branches (eg. refs/remotes/origin/master). You usually want the tags from the other end.

On the other hand, if you are fetching because you would want a one-shot merge from somebody else, you typically do not want to get tags from there. This happens more often for people near the toplevel but not limited to them. Mere mortals when pulling from each other do not necessarily want to automatically get private anchor point tags from the other person.

Often, "please pull" messages on the mailing list just provide two pieces of information: a repo URL and a branch name; this is designed to be easily cut&pasted at the end of a git fetch command line:

Linus, please pull from

        git://git..../proj.git master

to get the following updates...

becomes:

$ git pull git://git..../proj.git master

In such a case, you do not want to automatically follow the other person's tags.

One important aspect of Git is its distributed nature, which largely means there is no inherent "upstream" or "downstream" in the system. On the face of it, the above example might seem to indicate that the tag namespace is owned by the upper echelon of people and that tags only flow downwards, but that is not the case. It only shows that the usage pattern determines who are interested in whose tags.

A one-shot pull is a sign that a commit history is now crossing the boundary between one circle of people (e.g. "people who are primarily interested in the networking part of the kernel") who may have their own set of tags (e.g. "this is the third release candidate from the networking group to be proposed for general consumption with 2.6.21 release") to another circle of people (e.g. "people who integrate various subsystem improvements"). The latter are usually not interested in the detailed tags used internally in the former group (that is what "internal" means). That is why it is desirable not to follow tags automatically in this case.

It may well be that among networking people, they may want to exchange the tags internal to their group, but in that workflow they are most likely tracking each other's progress by having remote-tracking branches. Again, the heuristic to automatically follow such tags is a good thing.

On Backdating Tags

If you have imported some changes from another VCS and would like to add tags for major releases of your work, it is useful to be able to specify the date to embed inside of the tag object; such data in the tag object affects, for example, the ordering of tags in the gitweb interface.

To set the date used in future tag objects, set the environment variable GIT_COMMITTER_DATE (see the later discussion of possible values; the most common form is "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM").

For example:

$ GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="2006-10-02 10:31" git tag -s v1.0.1

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:

Git internal format
It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where <unix-timestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. <time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.
RFC 2822
The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.
ISO 8601

Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the T character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as 2005-04-07T22:13:13.

Note

In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.

FILES

$GIT_DIR/TAG_EDITMSG
This file contains the message of an in-progress annotated tag. If git tag exits due to an error before creating an annotated tag then the tag message that has been provided by the user in an editor session will be available in this file, but may be overwritten by the next invocation of git tag.

NOTES

When combining multiple --contains and --no-contains filters, only references that contain at least one of the --contains commits and contain none of the --no-contains commits are shown.

When combining multiple --merged and --no-merged filters, only references that are reachable from at least one of the --merged commits and from none of the --no-merged commits are shown.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-unpack-file(1)

NAME

git-unpack-file - Creates a temporary file with a blob's contents

SYNOPSIS

git unpack-file <blob>

DESCRIPTION

Creates a file holding the contents of the blob specified by sha1. It returns the name of the temporary file in the following format: .merge_file_XXXXX

OPTIONS

<blob>
Must be a blob id

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-unpack-objects(1)

NAME

git-unpack-objects - Unpack objects from a packed archive

SYNOPSIS

git unpack-objects [-n] [-q] [-r] [--strict]

DESCRIPTION

Read a packed archive (.pack) from the standard input, expanding the objects contained within and writing them into the repository in "loose" (one object per file) format.

Objects that already exist in the repository will not be unpacked from the packfile. Therefore, nothing will be unpacked if you use this command on a packfile that exists within the target repository.

See the section called “git-repack(1)” for options to generate new packs and replace existing ones.

OPTIONS

-n
Dry run. Check the pack file without actually unpacking the objects.
-q
The command usually shows percentage progress. This flag suppresses it.
-r
When unpacking a corrupt packfile, the command dies at the first corruption. This flag tells it to keep going and make the best effort to recover as many objects as possible.
--strict
Don't write objects with broken content or links.
--max-input-size=<size>
Die, if the pack is larger than <size>.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-update-index(1)

NAME

git-update-index - Register file contents in the working tree to the index

SYNOPSIS

git update-index
             [--add] [--remove | --force-remove] [--replace]
             [--refresh] [-q] [--unmerged] [--ignore-missing]
             [(--cacheinfo <mode>,<object>,<file>)…]
             [--chmod=(+|-)x]
             [--[no-]assume-unchanged]
             [--[no-]skip-worktree]
             [--[no-]ignore-skip-worktree-entries]
             [--[no-]fsmonitor-valid]
             [--ignore-submodules]
             [--[no-]split-index]
             [--[no-|test-|force-]untracked-cache]
             [--[no-]fsmonitor]
             [--really-refresh] [--unresolve] [--again | -g]
             [--info-only] [--index-info]
             [-z] [--stdin] [--index-version <n>]
             [--show-index-version]
             [--verbose]
             [--] [<file>…]

DESCRIPTION

Modifies the index. Each file mentioned is updated into the index and any unmerged or needs updating state is cleared.

See also the section called “git-add(1)” for a more user-friendly way to do some of the most common operations on the index.

The way git update-index handles files it is told about can be modified using the various options:

OPTIONS

--add
If a specified file isn't in the index already then it's added. Default behaviour is to ignore new files.
--remove
If a specified file is in the index but is missing then it's removed. Default behavior is to ignore removed files.
--refresh
Looks at the current index and checks to see if merges or updates are needed by checking stat() information.
-q
Quiet. If --refresh finds that the index needs an update, the default behavior is to error out. This option makes git update-index continue anyway.
--ignore-submodules
Do not try to update submodules. This option is only respected when passed before --refresh.
--unmerged
If --refresh finds unmerged changes in the index, the default behavior is to error out. This option makes git update-index continue anyway.
--ignore-missing
Ignores missing files during a --refresh
--cacheinfo <mode>,<object>,<path> , --cacheinfo <mode> <object> <path>
Directly insert the specified info into the index. For backward compatibility, you can also give these three arguments as three separate parameters, but new users are encouraged to use a single-parameter form.
--index-info
Read index information from stdin.
--chmod=(+|-)x
Set the execute permissions on the updated files.
--[no-]assume-unchanged

When this flag is specified, the object names recorded for the paths are not updated. Instead, this option sets/unsets the "assume unchanged" bit for the paths. When the "assume unchanged" bit is on, the user promises not to change the file and allows Git to assume that the working tree file matches what is recorded in the index. If you want to change the working tree file, you need to unset the bit to tell Git. This is sometimes helpful when working with a big project on a filesystem that has a very slow lstat(2) system call (e.g. cifs).

Git will fail (gracefully) in case it needs to modify this file in the index e.g. when merging in a commit; thus, in case the assumed-untracked file is changed upstream, you will need to handle the situation manually.

--really-refresh
Like --refresh, but checks stat information unconditionally, without regard to the "assume unchanged" setting.
--[no-]skip-worktree
When one of these flags is specified, the object names recorded for the paths are not updated. Instead, these options set and unset the "skip-worktree" bit for the paths. See section "Skip-worktree bit" below for more information.
--[no-]ignore-skip-worktree-entries
Do not remove skip-worktree (AKA "index-only") entries even when the --remove option was specified.
--[no-]fsmonitor-valid
When one of these flags is specified, the object names recorded for the paths are not updated. Instead, these options set and unset the "fsmonitor valid" bit for the paths. See section "File System Monitor" below for more information.
-g , --again
Runs git update-index itself on the paths whose index entries are different from those of the HEAD commit.
--unresolve
Restores the unmerged or needs updating state of a file during a merge if it was cleared by accident.
--info-only
Do not create objects in the object database for all <file> arguments that follow this flag; just insert their object IDs into the index.
--force-remove
Remove the file from the index even when the working directory still has such a file. (Implies --remove.)
--replace
By default, when a file path exists in the index, git update-index refuses an attempt to add path/file. Similarly if a file path/file exists, a file path cannot be added. With --replace flag, existing entries that conflict with the entry being added are automatically removed with warning messages.
--stdin
Instead of taking a list of paths from the command line, read a list of paths from the standard input. Paths are separated by LF (i.e. one path per line) by default.
--verbose
Report what is being added and removed from the index.
--index-version <n>

Write the resulting index out in the named on-disk format version. Supported versions are 2, 3, and 4. The current default version is 2 or 3, depending on whether extra features are used, such as git add -N. With --verbose, also report the version the index file uses before and after this command.

Version 4 performs a simple pathname compression that reduces index size by 30%-50% on large repositories, which results in faster load time. Git supports it since version 1.8.0, released in October 2012, and support for it was added to libgit2 in 2016 and to JGit in 2020. Older versions of this manual page called it "relatively young", but it should be considered mature technology these days.

--show-index-version
Report the index format version used by the on-disk index file. See --index-version above.
-z
Only meaningful with --stdin or --index-info; paths are separated with NUL character instead of LF.
--split-index , --no-split-index

Enable or disable split index mode. If split-index mode is already enabled and --split-index is given again, all changes in $GIT_DIR/index are pushed back to the shared index file.

These options take effect whatever the value of the core.splitIndex configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). But a warning is emitted when the change goes against the configured value, as the configured value will take effect next time the index is read and this will remove the intended effect of the option.

--untracked-cache , --no-untracked-cache

Enable or disable untracked cache feature. Please use --test-untracked-cache before enabling it.

These options take effect whatever the value of the core.untrackedCache configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). But a warning is emitted when the change goes against the configured value, as the configured value will take effect next time the index is read and this will remove the intended effect of the option.

--test-untracked-cache
Only perform tests on the working directory to make sure untracked cache can be used. You have to manually enable untracked cache using --untracked-cache or --force-untracked-cache or the core.untrackedCache configuration variable afterwards if you really want to use it. If a test fails the exit code is 1 and a message explains what is not working as needed, otherwise the exit code is 0 and OK is printed.
--force-untracked-cache
Same as --untracked-cache. Provided for backwards compatibility with older versions of Git where --untracked-cache used to imply --test-untracked-cache but this option would enable the extension unconditionally.
--fsmonitor , --no-fsmonitor
Enable or disable files system monitor feature. These options take effect whatever the value of the core.fsmonitor configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”). But a warning is emitted when the change goes against the configured value, as the configured value will take effect next time the index is read and this will remove the intended effect of the option.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.
<file>
Files to act on. Note that files beginning with . are discarded. This includes ./file and dir/./file. If you don't want this, then use cleaner names. The same applies to directories ending / and paths with //

USING --REFRESH

--refresh does not calculate a new sha1 file or bring the index up to date for mode/content changes. But what it does do is to "re-match" the stat information of a file with the index, so that you can refresh the index for a file that hasn't been changed but where the stat entry is out of date.

For example, you'd want to do this after doing a git read-tree, to link up the stat index details with the proper files.

USING --CACHEINFO OR --INFO-ONLY

--cacheinfo is used to register a file that is not in the current working directory. This is useful for minimum-checkout merging.

To pretend you have a file at path with mode and sha1, say:

$ git update-index --add --cacheinfo <mode>,<sha1>,<path>

--info-only is used to register files without placing them in the object database. This is useful for status-only repositories.

Both --cacheinfo and --info-only behave similarly: the index is updated but the object database isn't. --cacheinfo is useful when the object is in the database but the file isn't available locally. --info-only is useful when the file is available, but you do not wish to update the object database.

USING --INDEX-INFO

--index-info is a more powerful mechanism that lets you feed multiple entry definitions from the standard input, and designed specifically for scripts. It can take inputs of three formats:

  1. mode SP type SP sha1 TAB path

    This format is to stuff git ls-tree output into the index.

  2. mode SP sha1 SP stage TAB path

    This format is to put higher order stages into the index file and matches git ls-files --stage output.

  3. mode SP sha1 TAB path

    This format is no longer produced by any Git command, but is and will continue to be supported by update-index --index-info.

To place a higher stage entry to the index, the path should first be removed by feeding a mode=0 entry for the path, and then feeding necessary input lines in the third format.

For example, starting with this index:

$ git ls-files -s
100644 8a1218a1024a212bb3db30becd860315f9f3ac52 0       frotz

you can feed the following input to --index-info:

$ git update-index --index-info
0 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000      frotz
100644 8a1218a1024a212bb3db30becd860315f9f3ac52 1       frotz
100755 8a1218a1024a212bb3db30becd860315f9f3ac52 2       frotz

The first line of the input feeds 0 as the mode to remove the path; the SHA-1 does not matter as long as it is well formatted. Then the second and third line feeds stage 1 and stage 2 entries for that path. After the above, we would end up with this:

$ git ls-files -s
100644 8a1218a1024a212bb3db30becd860315f9f3ac52 1       frotz
100755 8a1218a1024a212bb3db30becd860315f9f3ac52 2       frotz

USING ASSUME UNCHANGED BIT

Many operations in Git depend on your filesystem to have an efficient lstat(2) implementation, so that st_mtime information for working tree files can be cheaply checked to see if the file contents have changed from the version recorded in the index file. Unfortunately, some filesystems have inefficient lstat(2). If your filesystem is one of them, you can set "assume unchanged" bit to paths you have not changed to cause Git not to do this check. Note that setting this bit on a path does not mean Git will check the contents of the file to see if it has changed -- it makes Git to omit any checking and assume it has not changed. When you make changes to working tree files, you have to explicitly tell Git about it by dropping "assume unchanged" bit, either before or after you modify them.

In order to set "assume unchanged" bit, use --assume-unchanged option. To unset, use --no-assume-unchanged. To see which files have the "assume unchanged" bit set, use git ls-files -v (see the section called “git-ls-files(1)”).

The command looks at core.ignorestat configuration variable. When this is true, paths updated with git update-index paths... and paths updated with other Git commands that update both index and working tree (e.g. git apply --index, git checkout-index -u, and git read-tree -u) are automatically marked as "assume unchanged". Note that "assume unchanged" bit is not set if git update-index --refresh finds the working tree file matches the index (use git update-index --really-refresh if you want to mark them as "assume unchanged").

Sometimes users confuse the assume-unchanged bit with the skip-worktree bit. See the final paragraph in the "Skip-worktree bit" section below for an explanation of the differences.

EXAMPLES

To update and refresh only the files already checked out:

$ git checkout-index -n -f -a && git update-index --ignore-missing --refresh
On an inefficient filesystem with core.ignorestat set
$ git update-index --really-refresh              1
$ git update-index --no-assume-unchanged foo.c   2
$ git diff --name-only                           3
$ edit foo.c
$ git diff --name-only                           4
M foo.c
$ git update-index foo.c                         5
$ git diff --name-only                           6
$ edit foo.c
$ git diff --name-only                           7
$ git update-index --no-assume-unchanged foo.c   8
$ git diff --name-only                           9
M foo.c

1

forces lstat(2) to set "assume unchanged" bits for paths that match index.

2

mark the path to be edited.

3

this does lstat(2) and finds index matches the path.

4

this does lstat(2) and finds index does not match the path.

5

registering the new version to index sets "assume unchanged" bit.

6

and it is assumed unchanged.

7

even after you edit it.

8

you can tell about the change after the fact.

9

now it checks with lstat(2) and finds it has been changed.

SKIP-WORKTREE BIT

Skip-worktree bit can be defined in one (long) sentence: Tell git to avoid writing the file to the working directory when reasonably possible, and treat the file as unchanged when it is not present in the working directory.

Note that not all git commands will pay attention to this bit, and some only partially support it.

The update-index flags and the read-tree capabilities relating to the skip-worktree bit predated the introduction of the the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” command, which provides a much easier way to configure and handle the skip-worktree bits. If you want to reduce your working tree to only deal with a subset of the files in the repository, we strongly encourage the use of the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” in preference to the low-level update-index and read-tree primitives.

The primary purpose of the skip-worktree bit is to enable sparse checkouts, i.e. to have working directories with only a subset of paths present. When the skip-worktree bit is set, Git commands (such as switch, pull, merge) will avoid writing these files. However, these commands will sometimes write these files anyway in important cases such as conflicts during a merge or rebase. Git commands will also avoid treating the lack of such files as an intentional deletion; for example git add -u will not stage a deletion for these files and git commit -a will not make a commit deleting them either.

Although this bit looks similar to assume-unchanged bit, its goal is different. The assume-unchanged bit is for leaving the file in the working tree but having Git omit checking it for changes and presuming that the file has not been changed (though if it can determine without stat'ing the file that it has changed, it is free to record the changes). skip-worktree tells Git to ignore the absence of the file, avoid updating it when possible with commands that normally update much of the working directory (e.g. checkout, switch, pull, etc.), and not have its absence be recorded in commits. Note that in sparse checkouts (setup by git sparse-checkout or by configuring core.sparseCheckout to true), if a file is marked as skip-worktree in the index but is found in the working tree, Git will clear the skip-worktree bit for that file.

SPLIT INDEX

This mode is designed for repositories with very large indexes, and aims at reducing the time it takes to repeatedly write these indexes.

In this mode, the index is split into two files, $GIT_DIR/index and $GIT_DIR/sharedindex.<SHA-1>. Changes are accumulated in $GIT_DIR/index, the split index, while the shared index file contains all index entries and stays unchanged.

All changes in the split index are pushed back to the shared index file when the number of entries in the split index reaches a level specified by the splitIndex.maxPercentChange config variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

Each time a new shared index file is created, the old shared index files are deleted if their modification time is older than what is specified by the splitIndex.sharedIndexExpire config variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

To avoid deleting a shared index file that is still used, its modification time is updated to the current time every time a new split index based on the shared index file is either created or read from.

UNTRACKED CACHE

This cache is meant to speed up commands that involve determining untracked files such as git status.

This feature works by recording the mtime of the working tree directories and then omitting reading directories and stat calls against files in those directories whose mtime hasn't changed. For this to work the underlying operating system and file system must change the st_mtime field of directories if files in the directory are added, modified or deleted.

You can test whether the filesystem supports that with the --test-untracked-cache option. The --untracked-cache option used to implicitly perform that test in older versions of Git, but that's no longer the case.

If you want to enable (or disable) this feature, it is easier to use the core.untrackedCache configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”) than using the --untracked-cache option to git update-index in each repository, especially if you want to do so across all repositories you use, because you can set the configuration variable to true (or false) in your $HOME/.gitconfig just once and have it affect all repositories you touch.

When the core.untrackedCache configuration variable is changed, the untracked cache is added to or removed from the index the next time a command reads the index; while when --[no-|force-]untracked-cache are used, the untracked cache is immediately added to or removed from the index.

Before 2.17, the untracked cache had a bug where replacing a directory with a symlink to another directory could cause it to incorrectly show files tracked by git as untracked. See the "status: add a failing test showing a core.untrackedCache bug" commit to git.git. A workaround for that is (and this might work for other undiscovered bugs in the future):

$ git -c core.untrackedCache=false status

This bug has also been shown to affect non-symlink cases of replacing a directory with a file when it comes to the internal structures of the untracked cache, but no case has been reported where this resulted in wrong "git status" output.

There are also cases where existing indexes written by git versions before 2.17 will reference directories that don't exist anymore, potentially causing many "could not open directory" warnings to be printed on "git status". These are new warnings for existing issues that were previously silently discarded.

As with the bug described above the solution is to one-off do a "git status" run with core.untrackedCache=false to flush out the leftover bad data.

FILE SYSTEM MONITOR

This feature is intended to speed up git operations for repos that have large working directories.

It enables git to work together with a file system monitor (see the section called “git-fsmonitor--daemon(1)” and the "fsmonitor-watchman" section of the section called “githooks(5)”) that can inform it as to what files have been modified. This enables git to avoid having to lstat() every file to find modified files.

When used in conjunction with the untracked cache, it can further improve performance by avoiding the cost of scanning the entire working directory looking for new files.

If you want to enable (or disable) this feature, it is easier to use the core.fsmonitor configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”) than using the --fsmonitor option to git update-index in each repository, especially if you want to do so across all repositories you use, because you can set the configuration variable in your $HOME/.gitconfig just once and have it affect all repositories you touch.

When the core.fsmonitor configuration variable is changed, the file system monitor is added to or removed from the index the next time a command reads the index. When --[no-]fsmonitor are used, the file system monitor is immediately added to or removed from the index.

CONFIGURATION

The command honors core.filemode configuration variable. If your repository is on a filesystem whose executable bits are unreliable, this should be set to false (see the section called “git-config(1)”). This causes the command to ignore differences in file modes recorded in the index and the file mode on the filesystem if they differ only on executable bit. On such an unfortunate filesystem, you may need to use git update-index --chmod=.

Quite similarly, if core.symlinks configuration variable is set to false (see the section called “git-config(1)”), symbolic links are checked out as plain files, and this command does not modify a recorded file mode from symbolic link to regular file.

The command looks at core.ignorestat configuration variable. See Using "assume unchanged" bit section above.

The command also looks at core.trustctime configuration variable. It can be useful when the inode change time is regularly modified by something outside Git (file system crawlers and backup systems use ctime for marking files processed) (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

The untracked cache extension can be enabled by the core.untrackedCache configuration variable (see the section called “git-config(1)”).

NOTES

Users often try to use the assume-unchanged and skip-worktree bits to tell Git to ignore changes to files that are tracked. This does not work as expected, since Git may still check working tree files against the index when performing certain operations. In general, Git does not provide a way to ignore changes to tracked files, so alternate solutions are recommended.

For example, if the file you want to change is some sort of config file, the repository can include a sample config file that can then be copied into the ignored name and modified. The repository can even include a script to treat the sample file as a template, modifying and copying it automatically.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-update-ref(1)

NAME

git-update-ref - Update the object name stored in a ref safely

SYNOPSIS

git update-ref [-m <reason>] [--no-deref-d <ref> [<old-oid>]
git update-ref [-m <reason>] [--no-deref] [--create-reflog<ref> <new-oid> [<old-oid>]
git update-ref [-m <reason>] [--no-deref--stdin [-z] [--batch-updates]

DESCRIPTION

Given two arguments, stores the <new-oid> in the <ref>, possibly dereferencing the symbolic refs. E.g. git update-ref HEAD <new-oid> updates the current branch head to the new object.

Given three arguments, stores the <new-oid> in the <ref>, possibly dereferencing the symbolic refs, after verifying that the current value of the <ref> matches <old-oid>. E.g. git update-ref refs/heads/master <new-oid> <old-oid> updates the master branch head to <new-oid> only if its current value is <old-oid>. You can specify 40 "0" or an empty string as <old-oid> to make sure that the ref you are creating does not exist.

The final arguments are object names; this command without any options does not support updating a symbolic ref to point to another ref (see the section called “git-symbolic-ref(1)”). But git update-ref --stdin does have the symref-* commands so that regular refs and symbolic refs can be committed in the same transaction.

If --no-deref is given, <ref> itself is overwritten, rather than the result of following the symbolic pointers.

With -d, it deletes the named <ref> after verifying that it still contains <old-oid>.

With --stdin, update-ref reads instructions from standard input and performs all modifications together. Specify commands of the form:

update SP <ref> SP <new-oid> [SP <old-oid>] LF
create SP <ref> SP <new-oid> LF
delete SP <ref> [SP <old-oid>] LF
verify SP <ref> [SP <old-oid>] LF
symref-update SP <ref> SP <new-target> [SP (ref SP <old-target> | oid SP <old-oid>)] LF
symref-create SP <ref> SP <new-target> LF
symref-delete SP <ref> [SP <old-target>] LF
symref-verify SP <ref> [SP <old-target>] LF
option SP <opt> LF
start LF
prepare LF
commit LF
abort LF

With --create-reflog, update-ref will create a reflog for each ref even if one would not ordinarily be created.

With --batch-updates, update-ref executes the updates in a batch but allows individual updates to fail due to invalid or incorrect user input, applying only the successful updates. However, system-related errors—such as I/O failures or memory issues—will result in a full failure of all batched updates. Any failed updates will be reported in the following format:

rejected SP (<old-oid> | <old-target>) SP (<new-oid> | <new-target>) SP <rejection-reason> LF

Quote fields containing whitespace as if they were strings in C source code; i.e., surrounded by double-quotes and with backslash escapes. Use 40 "0" characters or the empty string to specify a zero value. To specify a missing value, omit the value and its preceding SP entirely.

Alternatively, use -z to specify in NUL-terminated format, without quoting:

update SP <ref> NUL <new-oid> NUL [<old-oid>] NUL
create SP <ref> NUL <new-oid> NUL
delete SP <ref> NUL [<old-oid>] NUL
verify SP <ref> NUL [<old-oid>] NUL
symref-update SP <ref> NUL <new-target> [NUL (ref NUL <old-target> | oid NUL <old-oid>)] NUL
symref-create SP <ref> NUL <new-target> NUL
symref-delete SP <ref> [NUL <old-target>] NUL
symref-verify SP <ref> [NUL <old-target>] NUL
option SP <opt> NUL
start NUL
prepare NUL
commit NUL
abort NUL

In this format, use 40 "0" to specify a zero value, and use the empty string to specify a missing value.

In either format, values can be specified in any form that Git recognizes as an object name. Commands in any other format or a repeated <ref> produce an error. Command meanings are:

update
Set <ref> to <new-oid> after verifying <old-oid>, if given. Specify a zero <new-oid> to ensure the ref does not exist after the update and/or a zero <old-oid> to make sure the ref does not exist before the update.
create
Create <ref> with <new-oid> after verifying that it does not exist. The given <new-oid> may not be zero.
delete
Delete <ref> after verifying that it exists with <old-oid>, if given. If given, <old-oid> may not be zero.
symref-update
Set <ref> to <new-target> after verifying <old-target> or <old-oid>, if given. Specify a zero <old-oid> to ensure that the ref does not exist before the update.
verify
Verify <ref> against <old-oid> but do not change it. If <old-oid> is zero or missing, the ref must not exist.

symref-create: Create symbolic ref <ref> with <new-target> after verifying that it does not exist.

symref-delete
Delete <ref> after verifying that it exists with <old-target>, if given.
symref-verify
Verify symbolic <ref> against <old-target> but do not change it. If <old-target> is missing, the ref must not exist. Can only be used in no-deref mode.
option
Modify the behavior of the next command naming a <ref>. The only valid option is no-deref to avoid dereferencing a symbolic ref.
start
Start a transaction. In contrast to a non-transactional session, a transaction will automatically abort if the session ends without an explicit commit. This command may create a new empty transaction when the current one has been committed or aborted already.
prepare
Prepare to commit the transaction. This will create lock files for all queued reference updates. If one reference could not be locked, the transaction will be aborted.
commit
Commit all reference updates queued for the transaction, ending the transaction.
abort
Abort the transaction, releasing all locks if the transaction is in prepared state.

If all <ref>s can be locked with matching <old-oid>s simultaneously, all modifications are performed. Otherwise, no modifications are performed. Note that while each individual <ref> is updated or deleted atomically, a concurrent reader may still see a subset of the modifications.

LOGGING UPDATES

If config parameter "core.logAllRefUpdates" is true and the ref is one under "refs/heads/", "refs/remotes/", "refs/notes/", or a pseudoref like HEAD or ORIG_HEAD; or the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" exists then git update-ref will append a line to the log file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" (dereferencing all symbolic refs before creating the log name) describing the change in ref value. Log lines are formatted as:

oldsha1 SP newsha1 SP committer LF

Where "oldsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value previously stored in <ref>, "newsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value of <new-oid> and "committer" is the committer's name, email address and date in the standard Git committer ident format.

Optionally with -m:

oldsha1 SP newsha1 SP committer TAB message LF

Where all fields are as described above and "message" is the value supplied to the -m option.

An update will fail (without changing <ref>) if the current user is unable to create a new log file, append to the existing log file or does not have committer information available.

NOTES

Symbolic refs were initially implemented using symbolic links. This is now deprecated since not all filesystems support symbolic links.

This command follows real symlinks only if they start with "refs/": otherwise it will just try to read them and update them as a regular file (i.e. it will allow the filesystem to follow them, but will overwrite such a symlink to somewhere else with a regular filename).

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-update-server-info(1)

NAME

git-update-server-info - Update auxiliary info file to help dumb servers

SYNOPSIS

git update-server-info [-f | --force]

DESCRIPTION

A dumb server that does not do on-the-fly pack generations must have some auxiliary information files in $GIT_DIR/info and $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY/info directories to help clients discover what references and packs the server has. This command generates such auxiliary files.

OPTIONS

-f , --force
Update the info files from scratch.

OUTPUT

Currently the command updates the following files. Please see the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)” for a description of what they are for:

  • objects/info/packs
  • info/refs

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-upload-archive(1)

NAME

git-upload-archive - Send archive back to git-archive

SYNOPSIS

git upload-archive <repository>

DESCRIPTION

Invoked by git archive --remote and sends a generated archive to the other end over the Git protocol.

This command is usually not invoked directly by the end user. The UI for the protocol is on the git archive side, and the program pair is meant to be used to get an archive from a remote repository.

SECURITY

In order to protect the privacy of objects that have been removed from history but may not yet have been pruned, git-upload-archive avoids serving archives for commits and trees that are not reachable from the repository's refs. However, because calculating object reachability is computationally expensive, git-upload-archive implements a stricter but easier-to-check set of rules:

  1. Clients may request a commit or tree that is pointed to directly by a ref. E.g., git archive --remote=origin v1.0.
  2. Clients may request a sub-tree within a commit or tree using the ref:path syntax. E.g., git archive --remote=origin v1.0:Documentation.
  3. Clients may not use other sha1 expressions, even if the end result is reachable. E.g., neither a relative commit like master^ nor a literal sha1 like abcd1234 is allowed, even if the result is reachable from the refs.

Note that rule 3 disallows many cases that do not have any privacy implications. These rules are subject to change in future versions of git, and the server accessed by git archive --remote may or may not follow these exact rules.

If the config option uploadArchive.allowUnreachable is true, these rules are ignored, and clients may use arbitrary sha1 expressions. This is useful if you do not care about the privacy of unreachable objects, or if your object database is already publicly available for access via non-smart-http.

OPTIONS

<repository>
The repository to get a tar archive from.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-upload-pack(1)

NAME

git-upload-pack - Send objects packed back to git-fetch-pack

SYNOPSIS

git-upload-pack [--[no-]strict] [--timeout=<n>] [--stateless-rpc]
                  [--advertise-refs] <directory>

DESCRIPTION

Invoked by git fetch-pack, learns what objects the other side is missing, and sends them after packing.

This command is usually not invoked directly by the end user. The UI for the protocol is on the git fetch-pack side, and the program pair is meant to be used to pull updates from a remote repository. For push operations, see git send-pack.

OPTIONS

--[no-]strict
Do not try <directory>/.git/ if <directory> is not a Git directory.
--timeout=<n>
Interrupt transfer after <n> seconds of inactivity.
--stateless-rpc
Perform only a single read-write cycle with stdin and stdout. This fits with the HTTP POST request processing model where a program may read the request, write a response, and must exit.
--http-backend-info-refs
Used by the section called “git-http-backend(1)” to serve up $GIT_URL/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack requests. See "Smart Clients" in the section called “gitprotocol-http(5)” and "HTTP Transport" in the the section called “gitprotocol-v2(5)” documentation. Also understood by the section called “git-receive-pack(1)”.
<directory>
The repository to sync from.

ENVIRONMENT

GIT_PROTOCOL
Internal variable used for handshaking the wire protocol. Server admins may need to configure some transports to allow this variable to be passed. See the discussion in the section called “git(1)”.
GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH

When cloning or fetching from a partial repository (i.e., one itself cloned with --filter), the server-side upload-pack may need to fetch extra objects from its upstream in order to complete the request. By default, upload-pack will refuse to perform such a lazy fetch, because git fetch may run arbitrary commands specified in configuration and hooks of the source repository (and upload-pack tries to be safe to run even in untrusted .git directories).

This is implemented by having upload-pack internally set the GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH variable to 1. If you want to override it (because you are fetching from a partial clone, and you are sure you trust it), you can explicitly set GIT_NO_LAZY_FETCH to 0.

SECURITY

Most Git commands should not be run in an untrusted .git directory (see the section SECURITY in the section called “git(1)”). upload-pack tries to avoid any dangerous configuration options or hooks from the repository it's serving, making it safe to clone an untrusted directory and run commands on the resulting clone.

For an extra level of safety, you may be able to run upload-pack as an alternate user. The details will be platform dependent, but on many systems you can run:

git clone --no-local --upload-pack='sudo -u nobody git-upload-pack' ...

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-var(1)

NAME

git-var - Show a Git logical variable

SYNOPSIS

git var (-l | <variable>)

DESCRIPTION

Prints a Git logical variable. Exits with code 1 if the variable has no value.

OPTIONS

-l
Display the logical variables. In addition, all the variables of the Git configuration file .git/config are listed as well. (However, the configuration variables listing functionality is deprecated in favor of git config -l.)

EXAMPLES

$ git var GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT
Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@lnxi.com> 1121223278 -0600

VARIABLES

GIT_AUTHOR_IDENT
The author of a piece of code.
GIT_COMMITTER_IDENT
The person who put a piece of code into Git.
GIT_EDITOR
Text editor for use by Git commands. The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. Examples: ~/bin/vi, $SOME_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE, "C:\Program Files\Vim\gvim.exe" --nofork. The order of preference is $GIT_EDITOR, then core.editor configuration value, then $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, and then the default chosen at compile time, which is usually vi.
GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR
Text editor used to edit the todo file while running git rebase -i. Like GIT_EDITOR, the value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. The order of preference is $GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR, then sequence.editor configuration value, and then the value of git var GIT_EDITOR.
GIT_PAGER
Text viewer for use by Git commands (e.g., less). The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell. The order of preference is $GIT_PAGER, then the value of core.pager configuration, then $PAGER, and then the default chosen at compile time (usually less).
GIT_DEFAULT_BRANCH
The name of the first branch created in newly initialized repositories.
GIT_SHELL_PATH
The path of the binary providing the POSIX shell for commands which use the shell.
GIT_ATTR_SYSTEM
The path to the system the section called “gitattributes(5)” file, if one is enabled.
GIT_ATTR_GLOBAL
The path to the global (per-user) the section called “gitattributes(5)” file.
GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM
The path to the system configuration file, if one is enabled.
GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL
The path to the global (per-user) configuration files, if any.

Most path values contain only one value. However, some can contain multiple values, which are separated by newlines, and are listed in order from highest to lowest priority. Callers should be prepared for any such path value to contain multiple items.

Note that paths are printed even if they do not exist, but not if they are disabled by other environment variables.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-verify-commit(1)

NAME

git-verify-commit - Check the GPG signature of commits

SYNOPSIS

git verify-commit [-v | --verbose] [--raw<commit>

DESCRIPTION

Validates the GPG signature created by git commit -S on the commit objects given on the command line.

OPTIONS

--raw
Print the raw gpg status output to standard error instead of the normal human-readable output.
-v , --verbose
Print the contents of the commit object before validating it.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-verify-pack(1)

NAME

git-verify-pack - Validate packed Git archive files

SYNOPSIS

git verify-pack [-v | --verbose] [-s | --stat-only] [--<pack>.idx

DESCRIPTION

Read each idx file for packed Git archive given on the command line, and verify the idx file and the corresponding pack file.

OPTIONS

-v , --verbose
After verifying the pack, show the list of objects contained in the pack and a histogram of delta chain length.
-s , --stat-only
Do not verify the pack contents; only show the histogram of delta chain length. With --verbose, the list of objects is also shown.
--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

OUTPUT FORMAT

When specifying the -v option the format used is:

object-name type size size-in-packfile offset-in-packfile

for objects that are not deltified in the pack, and

object-name type size size-in-packfile offset-in-packfile depth base-object-name

for objects that are deltified.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-verify-tag(1)

NAME

git-verify-tag - Check the GPG signature of tags

SYNOPSIS

git verify-tag [-v | --verbose] [--format=<format>] [--raw<tag>

DESCRIPTION

Validates the gpg signature created by git tag in the tag objects listed on the command line.

OPTIONS

--raw
Print the raw gpg status output to standard error instead of the normal human-readable output.
-v , --verbose
Print the contents of the tag object before validating it.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-version(1)

NAME

git-version - Display version information about Git

SYNOPSIS

git version [--build-options]

DESCRIPTION

With no options given, the version of git is printed on the standard output.

Note that git --version is identical to git version because the former is internally converted into the latter.

OPTIONS

--build-options

Include additional information about how git was built for diagnostic purposes.

The libraries used to implement the SHA-1 and SHA-256 algorithms are displayed in the form SHA-1: <option> and SHA-256: <option>. Note that the SHA-1 options SHA1_APPLE, SHA1_OPENSSL, and SHA1_BLK do not use a collision detection algorithm and thus may be vulnerable to known SHA-1 collision attacks. When a faster SHA-1 implementation without collision detection is used for only non-cryptographic purposes, the algorithm is displayed in the form non-collision-detecting-SHA-1: <option>.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-web--browse(1)

NAME

git-web--browse - Git helper script to launch a web browser

SYNOPSIS

git web--browse [<options>] (<URL>|<file>)…

DESCRIPTION

This script tries, as much as possible, to display the URLs and FILEs that are passed as arguments, as HTML pages in new tabs on an already opened web browser.

The following browsers (or commands) are currently supported:

  • firefox (this is the default under X Window when not using KDE)
  • iceweasel
  • seamonkey
  • iceape
  • chromium (also supported as chromium-browser)
  • google-chrome (also supported as chrome)
  • konqueror (this is the default under KDE, see Note about konqueror below)
  • opera
  • w3m (this is the default outside graphical environments)
  • elinks
  • links
  • lynx
  • dillo
  • open (this is the default under Mac OS X GUI)
  • start (this is the default under MinGW)
  • cygstart (this is the default under Cygwin)
  • xdg-open

Custom commands may also be specified.

OPTIONS

-b <browser> , --browser=<browser>
Use the specified browser. It must be in the list of supported browsers.
-t <browser> , --tool=<browser>
Same as above.
-c <conf.var> , --config=<conf.var>
CONF.VAR is looked up in the Git config files. If it's set, then its value specifies the browser that should be used.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

CONF.VAR (from -c option) and web.browser

The web browser can be specified using a configuration variable passed with the -c (or --config) command-line option, or the web.browser configuration variable if the former is not used.

browser.<tool>.path

You can explicitly provide a full path to your preferred browser by setting the configuration variable browser.<tool>.path. For example, you can configure the absolute path to firefox by setting browser.firefox.path. Otherwise, git web--browse assumes the tool is available in PATH.

browser.<tool>.cmd

When the browser, specified by options or configuration variables, is not among the supported ones, then the corresponding browser.<tool>.cmd configuration variable will be looked up. If this variable exists then git web--browse will treat the specified tool as a custom command and will use a shell eval to run the command with the URLs passed as arguments.

NOTE ABOUT KONQUEROR

When konqueror is specified by a command-line option or a configuration variable, we launch kfmclient to try to open the HTML man page on an already opened konqueror in a new tab if possible.

For consistency, we also try such a trick if browser.konqueror.path is set to something like A_PATH_TO/konqueror. That means we will try to launch A_PATH_TO/kfmclient instead.

If you really want to use konqueror, then you can use something like the following:

        [web]
                browser = konq

        [browser "konq"]
                cmd = A_PATH_TO/konqueror

Note about git-config --global

Note that these configuration variables should probably be set using the --global flag, for example like this:

$ git config --global web.browser firefox

as they are probably more user specific than repository specific. See the section called “git-config(1)” for more information about this.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-whatchanged(1)

NAME

git-whatchanged - Show logs with differences each commit introduces

SYNOPSIS

git whatchanged <option>…

DESCRIPTION

Shows commit logs and diff output each commit introduces.

New users are encouraged to use the section called “git-log(1)” instead. The whatchanged command is essentially the same as the section called “git-log(1)” but defaults to showing the raw format diff output and skipping merges.

The command is primarily kept for historical reasons; fingers of many people who learned Git long before git log was invented by reading the Linux kernel mailing list are trained to type it.

Examples

git whatchanged -p v2.6.12.. include/scsi drivers/scsi
Show as patches the commits since version v2.6.12 that changed any file in the include/scsi or drivers/scsi subdirectories
git whatchanged --since="2 weeks ago" -- gitk
Show the changes during the last two weeks to the file gitk. The "--" is necessary to avoid confusion with the branch named gitk

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-worktree(1)

NAME

git-worktree - Manage multiple working trees

SYNOPSIS

git worktree add [-f] [--detach] [--checkout] [--lock [--reason <string>]]
                   [--orphan] [(-b | -B) <new-branch>] <path> [<commit-ish>]
git worktree list [-v | --porcelain [-z]]
git worktree lock [--reason <string>] <worktree>
git worktree move <worktree> <new-path>
git worktree prune [-n] [-v] [--expire <expire>]
git worktree remove [-f] <worktree>
git worktree repair [<path>…]
git worktree unlock <worktree>

DESCRIPTION

Manage multiple working trees attached to the same repository.

A git repository can support multiple working trees, allowing you to check out more than one branch at a time. With git worktree add a new working tree is associated with the repository, along with additional metadata that differentiates that working tree from others in the same repository. The working tree, along with this metadata, is called a "worktree".

This new worktree is called a "linked worktree" as opposed to the "main worktree" prepared by the section called “git-init(1)” or the section called “git-clone(1)”. A repository has one main worktree (if it's not a bare repository) and zero or more linked worktrees. When you are done with a linked worktree, remove it with git worktree remove.

In its simplest form, git worktree add <path> automatically creates a new branch whose name is the final component of <path>, which is convenient if you plan to work on a new topic. For instance, git worktree add ../hotfix creates new branch hotfix and checks it out at path ../hotfix. To instead work on an existing branch in a new worktree, use git worktree add <path> <branch>. On the other hand, if you just plan to make some experimental changes or do testing without disturbing existing development, it is often convenient to create a throwaway worktree not associated with any branch. For instance, git worktree add -d <path> creates a new worktree with a detached HEAD at the same commit as the current branch.

If a working tree is deleted without using git worktree remove, then its associated administrative files, which reside in the repository (see "DETAILS" below), will eventually be removed automatically (see gc.worktreePruneExpire in the section called “git-config(1)”), or you can run git worktree prune in the main or any linked worktree to clean up any stale administrative files.

If the working tree for a linked worktree is stored on a portable device or network share which is not always mounted, you can prevent its administrative files from being pruned by issuing the git worktree lock command, optionally specifying --reason to explain why the worktree is locked.

COMMANDS

add <path> [<commit-ish>]

Create a worktree at <path> and checkout <commit-ish> into it. The new worktree is linked to the current repository, sharing everything except per-worktree files such as HEAD, index, etc. As a convenience, <commit-ish> may be a bare "-", which is synonymous with @{-1}.

If <commit-ish> is a branch name (call it <branch>) and is not found, and neither -b nor -B nor --detach are used, but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to:

$ git worktree add --track -b <branch> <path> <remote>/<branch>

If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is named by the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable, we'll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if the <branch> isn't unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g. checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout remote branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the origin remote. See also checkout.defaultRemote in the section called “git-config(1)”.

If <commit-ish> is omitted and neither -b nor -B nor --detach used, then, as a convenience, the new worktree is associated with a branch (call it <branch>) named after $(basename <path>). If <branch> doesn't exist, a new branch based on HEAD is automatically created as if -b <branch> was given. If <branch> does exist, it will be checked out in the new worktree, if it's not checked out anywhere else, otherwise the command will refuse to create the worktree (unless --force is used).

If <commit-ish> is omitted, neither --detach, or --orphan is used, and there are no valid local branches (or remote branches if --guess-remote is specified) then, as a convenience, the new worktree is associated with a new unborn branch named <branch> (after $(basename <path>) if neither -b or -B is used) as if --orphan was passed to the command. In the event the repository has a remote and --guess-remote is used, but no remote or local branches exist, then the command fails with a warning reminding the user to fetch from their remote first (or override by using -f/--force).

list
List details of each worktree. The main worktree is listed first, followed by each of the linked worktrees. The output details include whether the worktree is bare, the revision currently checked out, the branch currently checked out (or "detached HEAD" if none), "locked" if the worktree is locked, "prunable" if the worktree can be pruned by the prune command.
lock
If a worktree is on a portable device or network share which is not always mounted, lock it to prevent its administrative files from being pruned automatically. This also prevents it from being moved or deleted. Optionally, specify a reason for the lock with --reason.
move
Move a worktree to a new location. Note that the main worktree or linked worktrees containing submodules cannot be moved with this command. (The git worktree repair command, however, can reestablish the connection with linked worktrees if you move the main worktree manually.)
prune
Prune worktree information in $GIT_DIR/worktrees.
remove
Remove a worktree. Only clean worktrees (no untracked files and no modification in tracked files) can be removed. Unclean worktrees or ones with submodules can be removed with --force. The main worktree cannot be removed.
repair [<path>…]

Repair worktree administrative files, if possible, if they have become corrupted or outdated due to external factors.

For instance, if the main worktree (or bare repository) is moved, linked worktrees will be unable to locate it. Running repair in the main worktree will reestablish the connection from linked worktrees back to the main worktree.

Similarly, if the working tree for a linked worktree is moved without using git worktree move, the main worktree (or bare repository) will be unable to locate it. Running repair within the recently-moved worktree will reestablish the connection. If multiple linked worktrees are moved, running repair from any worktree with each tree's new <path> as an argument, will reestablish the connection to all the specified paths.

If both the main worktree and linked worktrees have been moved or copied manually, then running repair in the main worktree and specifying the new <path> of each linked worktree will reestablish all connections in both directions.

unlock
Unlock a worktree, allowing it to be pruned, moved or deleted.

OPTIONS

-f , --force

By default, add refuses to create a new worktree when <commit-ish> is a branch name and is already checked out by another worktree, or if <path> is already assigned to some worktree but is missing (for instance, if <path> was deleted manually). This option overrides these safeguards. To add a missing but locked worktree path, specify --force twice.

move refuses to move a locked worktree unless --force is specified twice. If the destination is already assigned to some other worktree but is missing (for instance, if <new-path> was deleted manually), then --force allows the move to proceed; use --force twice if the destination is locked.

remove refuses to remove an unclean worktree unless --force is used. To remove a locked worktree, specify --force twice.

-b <new-branch> , -B <new-branch>
With add, create a new branch named <new-branch> starting at <commit-ish>, and check out <new-branch> into the new worktree. If <commit-ish> is omitted, it defaults to HEAD. By default, -b refuses to create a new branch if it already exists. -B overrides this safeguard, resetting <new-branch> to <commit-ish>.
-d , --detach
With add, detach HEAD in the new worktree. See "DETACHED HEAD" in the section called “git-checkout(1)”.
--[no-]checkout
By default, add checks out <commit-ish>, however, --no-checkout can be used to suppress checkout in order to make customizations, such as configuring sparse-checkout. See "Sparse checkout" in the section called “git-read-tree(1)”.
--[no-]guess-remote

With worktree add <path>, without <commit-ish>, instead of creating a new branch from HEAD, if there exists a tracking branch in exactly one remote matching the basename of <path>, base the new branch on the remote-tracking branch, and mark the remote-tracking branch as "upstream" from the new branch.

This can also be set up as the default behaviour by using the worktree.guessRemote config option.

--[no-]relative-paths

Link worktrees using relative paths or absolute paths (default). Overrides the worktree.useRelativePaths config option, see the section called “git-config(1)”.

With repair, the linking files will be updated if there's an absolute/relative mismatch, even if the links are correct.

--[no-]track
When creating a new branch, if <commit-ish> is a branch, mark it as "upstream" from the new branch. This is the default if <commit-ish> is a remote-tracking branch. See --track in the section called “git-branch(1)” for details.
--lock
Keep the worktree locked after creation. This is the equivalent of git worktree lock after git worktree add, but without a race condition.
-n , --dry-run
With prune, do not remove anything; just report what it would remove.
--orphan
With add, make the new worktree and index empty, associating the worktree with a new unborn branch named <new-branch>.
--porcelain
With list, output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This format will remain stable across Git versions and regardless of user configuration. It is recommended to combine this with -z. See below for details.
-z
Terminate each line with a NUL rather than a newline when --porcelain is specified with list. This makes it possible to parse the output when a worktree path contains a newline character.
-q , --quiet
With add, suppress feedback messages.
-v , --verbose

With prune, report all removals.

With list, output additional information about worktrees (see below).

--expire <time>

With prune, only expire unused worktrees older than <time>.

With list, annotate missing worktrees as prunable if they are older than <time>.

--reason <string>
With lock or with add --lock, an explanation why the worktree is locked.
<worktree>

Worktrees can be identified by path, either relative or absolute.

If the last path components in the worktree's path is unique among worktrees, it can be used to identify a worktree. For example if you only have two worktrees, at /abc/def/ghi and /abc/def/ggg, then ghi or def/ghi is enough to point to the former worktree.

REFS

When using multiple worktrees, some refs are shared between all worktrees, but others are specific to an individual worktree. One example is HEAD, which is different for each worktree. This section is about the sharing rules and how to access refs of one worktree from another.

In general, all pseudo refs are per-worktree and all refs starting with refs/ are shared. Pseudo refs are ones like HEAD which are directly under $GIT_DIR instead of inside $GIT_DIR/refs. There are exceptions, however: refs inside refs/bisect, refs/worktree and refs/rewritten are not shared.

Refs that are per-worktree can still be accessed from another worktree via two special paths, main-worktree and worktrees. The former gives access to per-worktree refs of the main worktree, while the latter to all linked worktrees.

For example, main-worktree/HEAD or main-worktree/refs/bisect/good resolve to the same value as the main worktree's HEAD and refs/bisect/good respectively. Similarly, worktrees/foo/HEAD or worktrees/bar/refs/bisect/bad are the same as $GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/foo/HEAD and $GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/bar/refs/bisect/bad.

To access refs, it's best not to look inside $GIT_DIR directly. Instead use commands such as the section called “git-rev-parse(1)” or the section called “git-update-ref(1)” which will handle refs correctly.

CONFIGURATION FILE

By default, the repository config file is shared across all worktrees. If the config variables core.bare or core.worktree are present in the common config file and extensions.worktreeConfig is disabled, then they will be applied to the main worktree only.

In order to have worktree-specific configuration, you can turn on the worktreeConfig extension, e.g.:

$ git config extensions.worktreeConfig true

In this mode, specific configuration stays in the path pointed by git rev-parse --git-path config.worktree. You can add or update configuration in this file with git config --worktree. Older Git versions will refuse to access repositories with this extension.

Note that in this file, the exception for core.bare and core.worktree is gone. If they exist in $GIT_DIR/config, you must move them to the config.worktree of the main worktree. You may also take this opportunity to review and move other configuration that you do not want to share to all worktrees:

  • core.worktree should never be shared.
  • core.bare should not be shared if the value is core.bare=true.
  • core.sparseCheckout should not be shared, unless you are sure you always use sparse checkout for all worktrees.

See the documentation of extensions.worktreeConfig in the section called “git-config(1)” for more details.

DETAILS

Each linked worktree has a private sub-directory in the repository's $GIT_DIR/worktrees directory. The private sub-directory's name is usually the base name of the linked worktree's path, possibly appended with a number to make it unique. For example, when $GIT_DIR=/path/main/.git the command git worktree add /path/other/test-next next creates the linked worktree in /path/other/test-next and also creates a $GIT_DIR/worktrees/test-next directory (or $GIT_DIR/worktrees/test-next1 if test-next is already taken).

Within a linked worktree, $GIT_DIR is set to point to this private directory (e.g. /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next in the example) and $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set to point back to the main worktree's $GIT_DIR (e.g. /path/main/.git). These settings are made in a .git file located at the top directory of the linked worktree.

Path resolution via git rev-parse --git-path uses either $GIT_DIR or $GIT_COMMON_DIR depending on the path. For example, in the linked worktree git rev-parse --git-path HEAD returns /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next/HEAD (not /path/other/test-next/.git/HEAD or /path/main/.git/HEAD) while git rev-parse --git-path refs/heads/master uses $GIT_COMMON_DIR and returns /path/main/.git/refs/heads/master, since refs are shared across all worktrees, except refs/bisect, refs/worktree and refs/rewritten.

See the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)” for more information. The rule of thumb is do not make any assumption about whether a path belongs to $GIT_DIR or $GIT_COMMON_DIR when you need to directly access something inside $GIT_DIR. Use git rev-parse --git-path to get the final path.

If you manually move a linked worktree, you need to update the gitdir file in the entry's directory. For example, if a linked worktree is moved to /newpath/test-next and its .git file points to /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next, then update /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next/gitdir to reference /newpath/test-next instead. Better yet, run git worktree repair to reestablish the connection automatically.

To prevent a $GIT_DIR/worktrees entry from being pruned (which can be useful in some situations, such as when the entry's worktree is stored on a portable device), use the git worktree lock command, which adds a file named locked to the entry's directory. The file contains the reason in plain text. For example, if a linked worktree's .git file points to /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next then a file named /path/main/.git/worktrees/test-next/locked will prevent the test-next entry from being pruned. See the section called “gitrepository-layout(5)” for details.

When extensions.worktreeConfig is enabled, the config file .git/worktrees/<id>/config.worktree is read after .git/config is.

LIST OUTPUT FORMAT

The worktree list command has two output formats. The default format shows the details on a single line with columns. For example:

$ git worktree list
/path/to/bare-source            (bare)
/path/to/linked-worktree        abcd1234 [master]
/path/to/other-linked-worktree  1234abc  (detached HEAD)

The command also shows annotations for each worktree, according to its state. These annotations are:

  • locked, if the worktree is locked.
  • prunable, if the worktree can be pruned via git worktree prune.
$ git worktree list
/path/to/linked-worktree    abcd1234 [master]
/path/to/locked-worktree    acbd5678 (brancha) locked
/path/to/prunable-worktree  5678abc  (detached HEAD) prunable

For these annotations, a reason might also be available and this can be seen using the verbose mode. The annotation is then moved to the next line indented followed by the additional information.

$ git worktree list --verbose
/path/to/linked-worktree              abcd1234 [master]
/path/to/locked-worktree-no-reason    abcd5678 (detached HEAD) locked
/path/to/locked-worktree-with-reason  1234abcd (brancha)
        locked: worktree path is mounted on a portable device
/path/to/prunable-worktree            5678abc1 (detached HEAD)
        prunable: gitdir file points to non-existent location

Note that the annotation is moved to the next line if the additional information is available, otherwise it stays on the same line as the worktree itself.

Porcelain Format

The porcelain format has a line per attribute. If -z is given then the lines are terminated with NUL rather than a newline. Attributes are listed with a label and value separated by a single space. Boolean attributes (like bare and detached) are listed as a label only, and are present only if the value is true. Some attributes (like locked) can be listed as a label only or with a value depending upon whether a reason is available. The first attribute of a worktree is always worktree, an empty line indicates the end of the record. For example:

$ git worktree list --porcelain
worktree /path/to/bare-source
bare

worktree /path/to/linked-worktree
HEAD abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234
branch refs/heads/master

worktree /path/to/other-linked-worktree
HEAD 1234abc1234abc1234abc1234abc1234abc1234a
detached

worktree /path/to/linked-worktree-locked-no-reason
HEAD 5678abc5678abc5678abc5678abc5678abc5678c
branch refs/heads/locked-no-reason
locked

worktree /path/to/linked-worktree-locked-with-reason
HEAD 3456def3456def3456def3456def3456def3456b
branch refs/heads/locked-with-reason
locked reason why is locked

worktree /path/to/linked-worktree-prunable
HEAD 1233def1234def1234def1234def1234def1234b
detached
prunable gitdir file points to non-existent location

Unless -z is used any "unusual" characters in the lock reason such as newlines are escaped and the entire reason is quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see the section called “git-config(1)”). For Example:

$ git worktree list --porcelain
...
locked "reason\nwhy is locked"
...

EXAMPLES

You are in the middle of a refactoring session and your boss comes in and demands that you fix something immediately. You might typically use the section called “git-stash(1)” to store your changes away temporarily, however, your working tree is in such a state of disarray (with new, moved, and removed files, and other bits and pieces strewn around) that you don't want to risk disturbing any of it. Instead, you create a temporary linked worktree to make the emergency fix, remove it when done, and then resume your earlier refactoring session.

$ git worktree add -b emergency-fix ../temp master
$ pushd ../temp
# ... hack hack hack ...
$ git commit -a -m 'emergency fix for boss'
$ popd
$ git worktree remove ../temp

BUGS

Multiple checkout in general is still experimental, and the support for submodules is incomplete. It is NOT recommended to make multiple checkouts of a superproject.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

git-write-tree(1)

NAME

git-write-tree - Create a tree object from the current index

SYNOPSIS

git write-tree [--missing-ok] [--prefix=<prefix>/]

DESCRIPTION

Creates a tree object using the current index. The name of the new tree object is printed to standard output.

The index must be in a fully merged state.

Conceptually, git write-tree sync()s the current index contents into a set of tree files. In order to have that match what is actually in your directory right now, you need to have done a git update-index phase before you did the git write-tree.

OPTIONS

--missing-ok
Normally git write-tree ensures that the objects referenced by the directory exist in the object database. This option disables this check.
--prefix=<prefix>/
Writes a tree object that represents a subdirectory <prefix>. This can be used to write the tree object for a subproject that is in the named subdirectory.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite

scalar(1)

NAME

scalar - A tool for managing large Git repositories

SYNOPSIS

scalar clone [--single-branch] [--branch <main-branch>] [--full-clone]
        [--[no-]src] [--[no-]tags] [--[no-]maintenance] <url> [<enlistment>]
scalar list
scalar register [--[no-]maintenance] [<enlistment>]
scalar unregister [<enlistment>]
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects | pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
scalar reconfigure [--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)] [ --all | <enlistment> ]
scalar diagnose [<enlistment>]
scalar delete <enlistment>

DESCRIPTION

Scalar is a repository management tool that optimizes Git for use in large repositories. Scalar improves performance by configuring advanced Git settings, maintaining repositories in the background, and helping to reduce data sent across the network.

An important Scalar concept is the enlistment: this is the top-level directory of the project. It usually contains the subdirectory src/ which is a Git worktree. This encourages the separation between tracked files (inside src/) and untracked files, such as build artifacts (outside src/). When registering an existing Git worktree with Scalar whose name is not src, the enlistment will be identical to the worktree.

The scalar command implements various subcommands, and different options depending on the subcommand. With the exception of clone, list and reconfigure --all, all subcommands expect to be run in an enlistment.

The following options can be specified before the subcommand:

-C <directory>
Before running the subcommand, change the working directory. This option imitates the same option of the section called “git(1)”.
-c <key>=<value>
For the duration of running the specified subcommand, configure this setting. This option imitates the same option of the section called “git(1)”.

COMMANDS

Clone

clone [<options>] <url> [<enlistment>]

Clones the specified repository, similar to the section called “git-clone(1)”. By default, only commit and tree objects are cloned. Once finished, the worktree is located at <enlistment>/src.

The sparse-checkout feature is enabled (except when run with --full-clone) and the only files present are those in the top-level directory. Use git sparse-checkout set to expand the set of directories you want to see, or git sparse-checkout disable to expand to all files (see the section called “git-sparse-checkout(1)” for more details). You can explore the subdirectories outside your sparse-checkout by using git ls-tree HEAD[:<directory>].

-b <name> , --branch <name>
Instead of checking out the branch pointed to by the cloned repository's HEAD, check out the <name> branch instead.
--[no-]single-branch

Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch, either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch remote's HEAD points at.

Further fetches into the resulting repository will only update the remote-tracking branch for the branch this option was used for the initial cloning. If the HEAD at the remote did not point at any branch when --single-branch clone was made, no remote-tracking branch is created.

--[no-]src
By default, scalar clone places the cloned repository within a <entlistment>/src directory. Use --no-src to place the cloned repository directly in the <enlistment> directory.
--[no-]tags
By default, scalar clone will fetch the tag objects advertised by the remote and future git fetch commands will do the same. Use --no-tags to avoid fetching tags in scalar clone and to configure the repository to avoid fetching tags in the future. To fetch tags after cloning with --no-tags, run git fetch --tags.
--[no-]full-clone
A sparse-checkout is initialized by default. This behavior can be turned off via --full-clone.
--[no-]maintenance
By default, scalar clone configures the enlistment to use Git's background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip this configuration.

List

list
List enlistments that are currently registered by Scalar. This subcommand does not need to be run inside an enlistment.

Register

register [<enlistment>]

Adds the enlistment's repository to the list of registered repositories and starts background maintenance. If <enlistment> is not provided, then the enlistment associated with the current working directory is registered.

Note: when this subcommand is called in a worktree that is called src/, its parent directory is considered to be the Scalar enlistment. If the worktree is not called src/, it itself will be considered to be the Scalar enlistment.

--[no-]maintenance
By default, scalar register configures the enlistment to use Git's background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip this configuration. This does not disable any maintenance that may already be enabled in other ways.

Unregister

unregister [<enlistment>]
Remove the specified repository from the list of repositories registered with Scalar and stop the scheduled background maintenance.

Run

scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects | pack-files ) [<enlistment>]

Run the given maintenance task (or all tasks, if all was specified). Except for all and config, this subcommand simply hands off to the section called “git-maintenance(1)” (mapping fetch to prefetch and pack-files to incremental-repack).

These tasks are run automatically as part of the scheduled maintenance, as soon as the repository is registered with Scalar. It should therefore not be necessary to run this subcommand manually.

The config task is specific to Scalar and configures all those opinionated default settings that make Git work more efficiently with large repositories. As this task is run as part of scalar clone automatically, explicit invocations of this task are rarely needed.

Reconfigure

After a Scalar upgrade, or when the configuration of a Scalar enlistment was somehow corrupted or changed by mistake, this subcommand allows to reconfigure the enlistment.

--all
When --all is specified, reconfigure all enlistments currently registered with Scalar by the scalar.repo config key. Use this option after each upgrade to get the latest features.
--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)
By default, Scalar configures the enlistment to use Git's background maintenance feature; this is the same as using the enable` value for this option. Use the disable value to remove each considered enlistment from background maintenance. Use `keep to leave the background maintenance configuration untouched for these repositories.

Diagnose

diagnose [<enlistment>]

When reporting issues with Scalar, it is often helpful to provide the information gathered by this command, including logs and certain statistics describing the data shape of the current enlistment.

The output of this command is a .zip file that is written into a directory adjacent to the worktree in the src directory.

Delete

delete <enlistment>
This subcommand lets you delete an existing Scalar enlistment from your local file system, unregistering the repository.

GIT

Part of the the section called “git(1)” suite



[1] Permitted pathnames have the form bf/fe/30//680d5a…: a sequence of directory names of two hexadecimal digits each followed by a filename with the rest of the object ID.